In a side note--holy crap, this story is over 80k! It'll probably be 90k by the time I wrap it up! Which should be this month, methinks *wipes forehead*
Title: Mutable: Chapter Twenty-Nine, Part Two
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Chapter Twenty-Nine, Part Two
A second after Christala’s
talon punctured his skin, she was ripped off of him—almost, but not quite, in time
for her to close her fingers around his throat and take it with her. It was
still agony, his blood flying off her hand to speckle his own face, but there was agony to feel instead of nothing at
all, and that was an unexpected sweetness. Cas tried to sit up, tried to follow
her flying body back, but there was nothing he could do now. He was broken, a
sad, listless shade of his former self, and there was no phage to save him from
suffering. He stared up at the ceiling, feeling a little like he wanted to rip his
own throat out, and tried to remember
to breathe. His body didn’t seem to want to do it for him.
No near-death
experience had ever led to Cas’s life flashing before his eyes. There were never
any midnight confessions, no secret things he’d wished he hadn’t left unsaid, and
certainly no thought of a fond reunion with the ones he’d lost on the other
side. There was no other side—there was only this side. So it was a little
surprising when faces seemed to swim before his eyes—Lilah and Shar, fretful,
their eyes teared up like they had been when he left them in the foyer…only
they hadn’t been crying then. Had they?
“Move, kids.” The
voice was vaguely familiar, but this wasn’t Rone. Amiru? Why would Cas be
seeing Amiru right before he died? “It’s been a long time since I had to put in
any time as a medic,” the king muttered as he pressed what felt like burning
coals dipped in acid against Cas’s neck. Something cool followed them, and
after that a blissful numbness started to spread from his ripped-up throat up
through his head, and down toward his brutalized joints.
“We should get Daddy,”
Lilah said worriedly. “He’ll fix him.”
“Your daddy is
going to need to get a hold of himself first, and he’s not going to do that
until he’s beaten that bitch’s body into an unrecognizable pulp, apparently,”
Amiru replied.
“She’s…dead?”
“If she wasn’t,
I wouldn’t be talking to you like this, kiddo.” He pressed a hand to his eye
and pulled it away a moment later, a speck of black smeared across one fingertip.
“Fuck. Fuck!” He raked his hand
across the carpet by Cas’s head, rubbing almost hard enough to break the
fibers. “That fucking…” The look he turned on Cas was a glare now. “How could
you do that to someone? What kind of
sick sons of bitches—”
He stopped
speaking when Shar pressed a hand against his mouth. The child shook his head,
and after a moment Amiru nodded. Shar took his hand back, and the king sighed. “Your
auntie would have my head if she could hear me, wouldn’t she?” he asked
tiredly.
“No swearing,”
Lilah agreed. “Where is Aunt Tiyana?”
“She’s…safe,
with the kids. I think.” He rubbed his eyes again, but this time his hand came
away clean. “Lilah, I need you to go to the front of the house and let in the rescue
workers who are on the way, all right? Bring two of them in to take care of Cas
here.”
Lilah shook her
head. “His name is Beren.”
“Oh, baby girl.
He’s got a lot to talk to you about.” Amiru scowled down at him. “When he can
speak again, that is. Go get the rescue workers and come back fast, all right?”
“Okay.” She
pressed to her feet and ran, leaving Shar and Amiru both hunched over Cas like
stone-eye frogs.
“I don’t know for
sure who you really are,” Amiru said to him after a moment. “I don’t know how
much of what I think of you comes from her and how much of it comes from you,
and none of that knowledge tells me how much of it is lies. But I’ll tell you
this, Cas.” He leaned in close, his
dark eyes cold. “If you cost me my brother with what the two of you have done,
I’ll do things to you that will make tearing your throat out seem benevolent, do
you understand me?”
Shar looked
unhappily between his uncle and Cas, the tears that had welled up finally
falling. He bent over at the waist and pressed his forehead to Cas’s shoulder.
Cas couldn’t quite feel it—everything was numb—but he twisted his hand outward
until it bumped what he assumed was Shar’s knee, and left it there. Amiru
looked like he wanted to move him, but then a noise pulled his attention away.
He groaned and pressed to his feet, then shuffled off toward…what, his wife? His
brother? Fresh guards, medical personnel? Cas didn’t know, and he didn’t care.
He was done. It
was done, it was over. Christala was dead. Amiru was right—she wouldn’t
relinquish control of him unless she was actually incapable of maintaining it,
and with the way Rone had pulled her back, quickly and so violently, the odds
were good that he’d followed up by killing her. Christala was dead. Beren was
avenged, or as close to it as possible. Cas could…stop, now. He could just
stop. He could die right now, and he would have accomplished the greatest proportion
of his goal. He could die, and Rone and his family could recover without him.
Or…
Or the phage could burn through Rone’s body
like a plague, spread to his children, spread to Amiru’s children. Or he could
traumatize the kids by dying here on the floor in a puddle of his own blood. Or
he could never find out what Christala had promised the other Delacoeurians who
had turned on their own people, could let them live out their new lives in
perfect harmony with the blood of thousands on their hands. He could leave his
husband alone. His husband. Rone.
Fuck that.
Cas closed his
eyes and focused on his breathing, keeping it slow and controlled, keeping his
heartrate as low as he could manage. He was still losing blood, but slowly, and
as long as he maintained his focus he could keep his body working for the time
being. He was aware of the sound of Shar breathing next to him, quiet, hitching
breaths, like he was crying and trying not to let on. Oh, baby. I’m sorry. It was awful that Shar had to see him like
this, but it would be infinitely worse if he died in front of the kid. He could
do this. He could live. He had to live.
“—off the
ground by now, are you kidding me?” Cas heard Rone above him, his voice as fiery
as a guardian angel. He would have smiled if he had the energy for it.
“My priority
was checking that you weren’t having your brain liquified by that parasite they
carry!” That was Amiru, a harsh, discordant note in the humming net of sound
that surrounded Cas.
“I already told
you, I’m fine, and he’s—shit, he’s
still bleeding. Shar, honey, go with your uncle, okay? I’ve got to get Beren to
the doctor.”
“Lilah’s
already gone for—”
“Lilah is nine, Amiru! She’s nine and she’s scared
and I’m not going to put the onus of saving her parent’s life on her ability to
run emergency medical personnel into the far side of this damn fortress!” Cas
vaguely felt his body jostle as Rone got his arms beneath him, and gingerly,
but with limbs that were oh-so-familiarly strong, lifted him into the air. His
knee screamed, but the pain was distant, like it was the result of empathy
instead of personal experience. They began to move, fast, and the sway of his
head pulled a whine out of him. Okay, the throat, that hurt.
“We’re almost
there,” Rone told him gently. “Almost to help. You helped me, I helped you,
this is what we do for each other, right? You saved me, now it’s my turn to
save you. The phage, though…” He actually chuckled, a tense, strained sound. “That
was a shot in the dark. You realize how close I came to losing my fucking mind?”
Cas had an
idea, but before he could force his eyes open to look at Rone—before he could
do anything at all—his own mind abruptly decided it had had enough. He passed
out to the sound of Lilah shouting, “Daddy!”
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