SNOW IS BULLSHIT!

Come on, Colorado, you had one job: be ready for planting after Mother's Day!

I was sitting down writing last night--writing Mutable--when my husband looked out into the darkness and said, "Fuck, it's snowing."

What's the big deal, eh? What's a little snow in May, especially in Colorado?

The big deal is we just spent this entire last weekend putting seedlings in the ground. Vegetables, fruits, flowers, plus plants to go in our xeric garden as well. It's the result of months of growing along the windows in our dining room, or plants that we paid for as part of a xeric push our county is doing to lower water usage. All getting snowed on.

Cue swearing, reaching for shoes and jackets and plastic trash bags, running outside into the snow and trying to protect our wee baby plants. I returned cold, grumpy, and wet. I haven't finished the chapter yet. I might today. I'll try. If not, I'll post by tomorrow or Thursday--no more week-long waits this late in the game. But fuuuuuuck.

Mutable: Chapter Thirty, Part One

Notes: OMG, we're almost at the end! Three more posts total after this, I'm thinking. For now, enjoy Cas getting some well-earned R&R...while under constant surveillance.

Title: Mutable: Chapter Thirty, Part One

***

Chapter Thirty, Part One

Overwhelming pain, for Cas, was usually like a flood, the water risen so high within him that the only thing to do was find a distant corner of the cavern of his mind and either hope the air held out, or drown there. The phage was poor at pain management—healing was fast, but it entailed enduring a lot of suffering over the duration. Mental discipline had been the best way to handle it, and that had been a brutal learning curve. Cas was used to it, though. He knew how to handle that kind of pain.

It was different this time. There was no ticking clock in the back of his head counting down the seconds he’d need to endure, no gritted teeth or forced calm. If pain was a flood, then Cas was definitely underwater, but this time…breathing didn’t seem to matter. His whole body felt cool and relaxed, his mind pleasantly empty of anything that might disturb him. He was probably on some really excellent painkillers, then.

He understood that there were sounds around him—whispering noises, people or machines, but rather than try to rise and face them, he let himself go deeper. Eventually he touched down in a place he barely remembered. It looked like his childhood home—two rooms, one for cooking and company and one for all of them to sleep in, with stone floors and walls and a slate ceiling. It was cold, but in a comfortingly familiar way. There was the rug his grandmother had hand-knotted, there was his mother’s favorite cup sitting beside the kettle, and there was—Beren.

He seemed like just a baby, barely old enough to play with the other kids outside. His big, dark eyes were full of wisdom when he looked up, though. “Is it better?” he asked in his sweet, childish voice.

Cas sat down next to him. “Is what better?”

“How you feel now.”

This isn’t a conversation you need to have, Cas argued with himself momentarily. Much less with your mind tricking you into seeing Beren. That’s playing dirty. But surprisingly, he didn’t mind it so much. Maybe because he knew Christala was dead. It was a sick comfort, but nevertheless a solid one to rest on. “It’s better,” Cas said after a moment’s reflection. “Because it means that the hardest part is over.”

“But you’re not done.”

“No,” Cas agreed. “But I also might not get the chance to finish any of the rest of it. I went after the most important person first, and she’s dead now. If that’s what I have to be satisfied with, then I can be.”

“Do you wanna be?”

“What, satisfied? With just her?” Beren nodded, and Cas looked at the floor between them for a moment, following a familiar white vein of quartz to its inevitable end at the wall. “It would be a comfort in some ways,” he confessed. “To just be done with it all. To forget about the others and be happy with the havoc I managed to wreak here on Imperia.”

Beren reached over and took his hand. “You saved them.”

“I know.” Cas squeezed reassuringly. “I know I did. They know it too, but that doesn’t mean anyone is going to admit it, and I did a lot of highly illegal stuff to get here in the first place, so…we’ll have to see how it all balanced out. I don’t think I can rely on anything.”

“Rone,” Beren said very simply.

“You think I can rely on him?” Cas considered it. “Maybe. Absolutely in some ways, almost certainly not in others. Again, it will be a balancing act. If I’m lucky, he’ll order me sent off to join a group of Delacoeurian refugees, with a new identity. I’m sure he won’t let his brother do anything permanent to me.” Almost sure. Nearly sure.

Beren patted his hand. “He won’t.”

“Okay.” Cas opened his arm, and his little brother climbed over and into his lap. He hugged him close and nestled his face against the smooth, glossy black hair and decided it was all right to remember how to breathe.

Gradually he became more and more aware of his actual surroundings—there was a blanket on top of him, just a wisp of weight that nevertheless did a good job of keeping him warm from the chest down. One of his arms was free—or not free, exactly, but not confined by the blanket. It was warm too, and so was the left side of his chest…

Ah. He’d been turned into a pillow. Hell, the children had to be exhausted, what was Rone thinking letting them lie with Cas here when he was little better than a lump?

“…soon as possible.”

“That’s not going to happen.” That was Rone’s voice, and the other one was…Doctor Weiss, maybe?

“Wishing it isn’t so isn’t going to change things.”

“Wishing doesn’t factor into it. And keep your voice down, the kids are asleep.”

There was a long sigh. “I don’t know if you understand how precarious Beren’s position here is. He knowingly carried a virulent alien parasite within reach of our royal family. Not just you and your children, but Amiru’s as well.”

“He was hunting down another carrier.”

“That doesn’t matter! He should have reported her instead of—”

“How successful would a report from a refugee from a distant planet have been? What kind of impact would that have made with the admiralty? Would Amiru ever have even seen it cross his desk? No. Cas did the only thing he could, which was follow her himself.”

“While deceiving you and everyone else around him.” Weiss sounded tired. “Cas, yes, not Beren. That’s a great deal of the problem, right there. How can you be so blind to it?”

“He saved Amiru’s life.” Rone’s voice was firm. “And he saved mine.”

“He infected you with his own parasite, which then did its level best to kill you, from the look of things. Without your genetic modifications bolstering your immune system, the results could very easily have proven fatal.”

“But they weren’t. I’m fine.”

“You’re nowhere near fine!” Doctor Weiss spoke in a furious whisper. “I can’t extract it, do you understand that? It consciously evades detection in your blood and tissues! And your body is viral-resistant, so to engineer a virus that could successfully hunt it down would have to be so strong it would almost certainly kill you! And we’ve seen what these things are capable of now, thank to the vids from your brother’s home. Do you honestly think there’s any chance of you salvaging your military career after this? You’ll be lucky if the king doesn’t stick you on an island in the middle of a sea of lava.”

“I didn’t know you cared.”

“I care about the strength of the empire. I care about Imperia’s future. With you and Amiru working together, I was…optimistic.”

It was Rone’s turn to sigh. “Optimistic about what? That we could continue our conquest of the other settled worlds unmolested? That I’d go back to doing my brother’s dirty work without a qualm? Believe it or not, I think the phage is a good thing for us to know about. It proves that there are things out there that we don’t have a handle on and can’t control. Maybe it’ll make Amiru think twice about exerting the control of the crown over planets that have nothing to do with us.”

“You used to think that way too,” Doctor Weiss said thoughtfully. “Did the children change you so thoroughly?”

“They did,” Rone said. After a moment, he added, “Not just the children.”

“I can see that. Well, I can’t—” The doctor paused. “Ah. I think he’s waking up.”

“Good. Let’s move the kids. I want to talk to him alone.” There were sleepy grumbled, and the sudden absence of comfortable warmth, and then…silence. If Cas had still had his enhanced hearing, maybe he would have been able to detect Rone’s heartbeat or breathing, but to him it sounded like…nothing. Had Rone left him too? When was he coming back?

“Cas.” A big, broad hand covered his bare shoulder, and Cas shuddered with relief. “Look at me.”

With a grunt of effort, Cas opened his eyes.

Mutable: Chapter Twenty-Nine, Part Two

Notes: Rocks fall, but nobody dies! Well, that's not exactly true, but it's all good. Well, that's not exactly true either, but...anyway, please just enjoy and read on.

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

***

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!”

Mutable: Chapter Twenty-Nine, Part One

Notes: So, um...graphic descriptions of violence ahead. Yep, this is a trigger warning--actual violence and threats of violence happen in this chapter, so arm your expectations accordingly. Love you!

Title: Mutable: Chapter Twenty-Nine, Part One

***

Chapter Twenty-Nine, Part One

Christala looked at Cas in complete and utter horror. “You’ve killed him!” She crawled over to Rone’s side and inspected his face, checked his pulse, every one of her movements jerky and frantic. “You’ve fucking killed him! You know he won’t be able to handle so much of the phage, he’s too old…I can’t believe you…you…” She banged her fist against the floor as she glared at Rone’s body. “This won’t work without him, Cas!”

Cas had his own ideas on whether or not he’d actually gone and killed Rone, but there was no point in bringing them up with Christala. Focus on what you know. “I wasn’t about to let you make him into a thrall.”

“You said you loved him! How could you do this to someone you love?” She turned and looked at him in utter incomprehension. “Why wouldn’t you want him to live? At all costs, to live? Isn’t that what love is supposed to mean?”

“Living as your slave would be worse than dying,” Cas said with complete honesty. Rone was thrashing some, and the rapid eye movement happening beneath his eyelids was startling, but Cas still wasn’t convinced that all was lost. “And I think of everyone I’ve ever known, you’re the least likely to be an authority on love.”

Her face went still and cold. “You don’t know anything about me. About how I love.”

“No, I don’t,” Cas murmured. “I’ve never seen any love in you, except for yourself. And even that has been tainted by all the blood you’ve spilled learning how to make your own pleasures. That’s all this entire exercise has been for you—a new way of pleasing yourself, a new way of playing a very old game. You didn’t love your own people enough to want to save us, and you don’t love the system enough to spare it the horrors of war. If that’s all your love amounts to, then it’s not even enough to fill a snail’s shell.”

“What about you?” she snapped back. “You speak like you’re some sort of authority on love, when in reality you’ve never valued the love you had, not ever! You had a family that adored you, a brother who worshipped you, and you still couldn’t get away from them fast enough. You preferred to risk the phage rather than stay and work with them, and after you survived, you never went to see them. I remember, when everyone was let go for holidays.” Her eyes seemed to bore into Cas’s face. “I didn’t have anywhere to go, so I stayed behind, but you did too! When you had people who wanted you! And then they died, and you were forced to pay attention to your brother, but you never wanted to, did you. What kind of love is that?”

“Two children was one too many for them to care for.” It sounded, it even felt, like a rationalization, but Cas knew it was the truth. “They were sick for years. After my mother had Beren, I knew I had to go. They needed to focus on him.” Beren had been a sickly child as well, taking up every moment of their parents’ time and then some, but it had been all right. Cas had been healthy, one of the healthiest kids in the city—leaving was the best thing he could do for his family, and he’d known it even at the age of ten.

“And here!” Christala went on like she didn’t even hear him. “Here you have your own children, here you have a husband who, for better or worse, is actually married to you—someone compelled to love you! And what did you do to him?” She slapped the ground next to Rone’s head. “You poisoned him with phage!” She brought her hands to her head and clutched her temples, moaning. “I can feel it killing mine, it’s burrowing deeper into his brain…his mind will be putty in less than a minute. You’ve ruined everything, Cas!” Christala wailed like an animal. “You’ve ruined him! Taking Amiru back will be so much less satisfying now.”

That was as good an invitation as he was going to get recorded by the cameras. Cas detached the stained, sooty sash he still had over his shoulder and wound it carefully between his hands. He didn’t speak—there was no point in arguing with her—just edged closer and closer until finally, he was close enough to make his move. He lunged, flipping the loop over her head and drawing it tight even as he turned his body away from her, his hands moving in opposite directions as they drew the makeshift garrote tight. If he had her properly, she would be leaning against him back to back now, choking out her last breaths and unable to reach him with her lashing limbs…

He didn’t have her properly, not tight enough to hold well. She rolled off to the side, trying to get one of her own arms around his neck as her other hand chopped at his grip. She still had enough of the phage in her body to harden the edge of her palm, and Cas let go of the sash with a curse as he felt a small bone break. He turned into her and got his feet up between them, kicked her hard in the hip to splay her out as he tried to loop his free leg around her head. He got her, and smashed her head down to the ground, but she rolled over his leg into a crouch and snapped her foot around in an arcing kick.

He saw it coming, he knew exactly where it was going to land, but he still couldn’t quite manage to avoid it. He took the ball of her foot to the side of his head, and reeled back against the floor as the thud sent sparks spinning across his vision.

Grasping hands found his ankle, and a moment later—snap. Cas tried not to scream, but he hadn’t felt such deep, inescapable pain without the phage’s dulling factors since he was a kid. The breath tore out of his lungs, leaving him gasping, and as the hands found his knee, he kicked again—without finesse, without control, just kicked in a frenzy of fear and panic. It didn’t stop her. His leg was controlled, positioned just so off the ground, so that his lower leg was higher than his hip, and then—crack. He felt his knee forced in on itself and screamed once more. A surge of adrenaline let him sit up and lash out at Christala with his hands. He clawed desperately, felt his fingers rake her face, but then she grabbed his wrists and forced him back into the ground.

Christala’s face was right above his, her eyes wide, mouth open as she panted. Hot breath struck his cheek like a slap. Cas watched as the furrows he’d raked in her cheek slowly, crawlingly, knitted themselves closed. “You were never strong enough for this,” she told him. “You could never take me on directly. You knew it, so you sabotaged my plan. But I’ll find a way to rebuild, Cas. And when I do?” She leaned in closer to him, until her lips hovered just over his, and whispered, “I’ll start by killing those children. The ones you could have saved, if you’d just stood aside. I’ll cut out their bones one by one, and I’ll tell them it’s all because of you.”

She reached down and wrapped her hand around his throat, sharpening the tips of her fingers so she could dig in and around his trachea. Cas choked—she was literally going to rip his throat out, and there was nothing he could do about it.

“Goodbye, Cas.”