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Julien has decided that it does not count as lying, so long as Lady Aranessa is doing it too. In the morning, he will tell her that he slept as well as he could. She will tell him the same.
Of course he is not sleeping. His anger keeps him up at night, prickling beneath his skin. In the daylight hours he is well-distracted, scanning for threats and guarding his lady. The nights are too long. When he shuts his eyes he only sees... well. He doesn’t shut his eyes.
Tonight, his second shadow is in a particular mood. As if there’s a thread tied around his wrist, or puppet strings at his joints, or he is following the lead of a more experienced dancer, Julien stalks through the short halls of the inn. He is awake, but only just; his body can move him as it pleases. He feels like a pile of broken glass.
It’s the new moon tonight, and he carries no lantern. No sense in alerting any enemies to his position. The absolute darkness mutes his footfalls and quiets his breathing. It is also what lets him notice the faint glow flickering under one of the doors, far too late into the night.
Julien doesn’t knock, though a whisper in the back of his mind hisses that this is a noble’s room, that he should wait to be properly announced and received. He does his best to throttle that whisper. The hinges of the door are well-maintained; there’s no squeak, and his steps are quiet. But the vague plan to make sure that the boy hasn’t decided to kill them all—willing or not—fails the moment the door opens. Julien is on the wrong side of the candle.
The boy isn’t in the rickety wooden chair at the bedside, or pacing the warped floorboards the way he has at every other inn they’ve stayed in so far. He’s sprawled out on the narrow bed with his jabot missing and his vest open and his shirt unbuttoned to the waist. Julien catches a glimpse of the long, strange scar on his torso that has evidently not been healing.
When he doesn’t startle, Julien puts his hand on the hilt of his sword and privately curses his current lack of armor.
“Don’t be like that,” the corpse sighs. That is not Occtis Tachonis.
Julien moves forward to dispatch the creature at once. He’s fast, skilled, sharp even when he’s exhausted. And he’s had days upon days of travel to work out how he’d do this, when the moment finally came.
But all of his preparation comes to nothing when he raises his sword and his wrist is caught by his own shadow.
The movement stalls, the strike ruined, and the shock of the smoky band of void-dark nothing restraining his arm makes him drop his rapier. Foolish. The man who loses his weapon is a dead man. He moves to bludgeon with his gauntlet instead, and a second snare of darkness catches his other arm. The thing on the bed doesn’t move as Julien is wrestled, snarling, into the old chair that sits at the bedside.
“So fucking dramatic. Does he look hurt? Does he seem feral? Breathe.”
At the command, the shadows at his wrists tighten, then ease. But there are many, many shadows in this room, cast by the flame of the lone candle, and though their grip has loosened his wrists are very much still bound to the creaking arms of the chair.
“Of all the people to get stuck with. He’s got no luck at all. I always thought that was supposed to reset when you die.”
There’s something happening right now that he doesn’t understand. But like a sunny morning after a long night of drinking, several unpleasant conclusions are beginning to dawn on him. No.
The body sits up without shyness, doesn’t hunch to make itself smaller. The coat slips down to the elbows, an odd mimicry of a shawl. The jabot is nowhere in sight. He can see the stillness in its neck where a pulse should be.
“Running around with this kid—you’re lucky it was me. He’s not an open book, Julien, he’s an open door.” The smile curling at the pale mouth is condescending. The use of his first name is presumptuous. And the way the hair stands up on the back of Julien’s neck, the shiver of absolute disdain that rolls through him—there is only one wayward, unnatural spirit that this could be.
“You.” He snaps his teeth around the word, almost wordless at this, this impossibility. It’s yet another wrong the world has done to him.
“Me,” Thjazi Fang mocks.
Julien lunges again. So what if his arms are bound; he still has teeth. He doesn’t get two inches off the seat before a thicker band of shadow catches him around the waist and hauls him back into it.
“Stop it,” the boy snaps, and that is Tachonis because the next thing he says is, “Listen, it’s really not a big deal. Or it’s not what it looks like? I guess I don’t really know what it looks like. I’m not, I’m still in here.”
Julien glares at him. “You believe I will conceal this, this possession from the rest of our traveling party.”
“It’s not permanent! Or, it shouldn’t be. Look, I’m just doing some tests and he was in the area, ah, metaphysically. And we got to talking, kind of, and swore not to hurt each other—”
“Thjazi Fang,” Julien grits out, “does not keep to his oaths.”
For a moment, it’s quiet enough for him to hear the stuttering wick of the candle. Julien’s heartbeat is loud in his ears and his face is hot with anger. He had spoken true at the wake; he would very much like to watch Thjazi die for a second time. Still, he is not so mindless that he will throw Tachonis away in a moment of reckless, pointless wrath.
“I don’t think he can hurt me, in our current arrangement,” the boy admits. “But I haven’t really tested it yet.”
“Normally, I would not care how you choose to make a fool of yourself,” Julien informs him. “However, you are putting yourself in danger. Worse, you are putting my lady in danger. Did you not consider how this might hurt her? Do you think at all before you act?”
“Hang on, I wouldn’t do anything to hurt Lady Aranessa, I owe her—” A shadow crosses his face.
“We shouldn’t talk about ‘Ness,” Thjazi says, pulling the Tachonis boy’s mouth into a smirk. “I’d have to kill you, and I don’t wanna stain the kid’s coat. You’re so presumptuous—there’s no way she’s started letting dogs sleep in her bed or make choices about what counts as dangerous.”
Julien turns his eyes to the dark ceiling and counts backwards from five, because trying to kill the man again will only fail. It does nothing to cool his temper. “Whatever. We need to exorcise this ghost from your body and move on, lest he haunt you for the rest of your life.”
“I’m dead,” the Tachonis boy points out. “Also, you’re the one who came into my room, so you don’t really have a right to complain about what I’m getting up to—”
The edge of his mouth pulls into an interrupting grin. “We’re both dead,” Thjazi chimes in, and Julien’s been haunted by his voice for long enough that he lays it over the mismatched scene without thinking. It doesn’t sound like Occtis Tachonis at all when Thjazi says, “If only someone would protect this noble from the terrible rogue intruding on his rest.”
The mouth frowns. “You have him tied up, I don’t need protecting,” the boy argues.
“Nah, he’s still thinking about killing you. Well, killing you to kill me. He doesn’t hate you just yet, but you’re a monster being possessed by his greatest enemy. It’s his duty to strangle you to death as soon as he can get up from this chair, he’s the hero. It doesn’t matter if I meant to be here or not.”
The band of shadows around his waist tightens like a reminder. As if Julien could fucking forget. “You are suggesting you fell out of the underworld. That you are so incompetent you could not stay in the afterlife, and you just so happened to be in our vicinity. You expect me to believe that?”
“Julien, I don’t give a damn what you believe,” Thjazi says, infuriating and irreverent. “I was having a decent night before you wandered in here.”
A twitch at the mouth—Tachonis frowns, fleeting and embarrassed, before sinking beneath the surface again. There’s something neither of them is telling him. Julien detests liars, and he’s never been able to resist a secret.
He catches a glimpse of the bloodless wound on the body’s chest, and his heart stutters oddly. A series of details fall into place. He’d been laying on the bed, unusual for him. The coat is hanging around his elbows, the vest is gaping open, the shirt is unbuttoned to the waistline of the trousers—he’d thought Tachonis was inspecting himself for wounds, searching for changes on his strange body, but all of his usual tools of study are nowhere to be seen.
“You,” he hisses, gritting his teeth. “Are you attempting to seduce him?”
“It’s really not like that—”
“I’ve never seduced anything in my life,” Thjazi lies, running a gloved hand through Tachonis’s hair. “Easy,” he says, not to Julien. “Maybe he can help you out.”
Tachonis frowns, but Julien sees the way he leans into the confident comfort of the hand. “You just said he’s still thinking about killing me,” the boy points out.
“Sure,” Thjazi murmurs, “but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have his uses.” Julien expects to watch the grip tighten on the boy’s hair, but Thjazi is patient in this. Perhaps it’s because of the circumstances; Julien has never considered him a patient man.
“I am not so low as that,” Julien snarls, glaring. He feels like an animal. For all his sins, he is no thief of virtue. Well, not a noble’s virtue. Well, not this noble’s virtue. “The boy—”
Thjazi smirks, crooked, and there’s a chill in the air as Tachonis cocks his head to one side and looks Julien over. Now that he has seen their differences in manner it would be impossible to confuse the two, for all that they are sharing a body.
Tachonis looks at him, all of the awkwardness and embarrassment of the youth that plagues him somehow missing. His voice is quiet as he says, “I want to know what it feels like.”
And perhaps Julien is low and foul, for the anger and revulsion in his gut turns like a dog going home, barreling down a well-worn path. He chokes on lust, disgusted with himself over it, because Occtis Tachonis wants to know what it feels like, and Julien is the only one who can tell him. He is needed.
“You’re being a fool. I am dangerous. I could harm you.” It doesn’t matter that he’s bound, it doesn't matter that he’s in a dark room with an enemy of shadow. The boy is, Occtis is, he’s soft. He’s weak, and Julien must be the slavering beast at his door, teeth bared, for he is hardly the stalwart knight in this moment.
A gloved thumb slides into his mouth and settles against his molars, the hand gripping him by the lower jaw. Occtis is not hurting him, but neither is he particularly gentle when he tilts Julien’s face and peers into his mouth. The inside of his head goes fuzzy and numb.
The boy tilts his chin up. Julien swallows a humiliating sound, his throat clicking audibly.
“You can’t hurt me,” he explains, “because I won’t let you.”
“You could go,” Thjazi says, easy, like Occtis doesn’t have a grip on Julien’s face. “He doesn’t want you to. And you don’t want to. But you could go, pace the halls like you were doing, and leave the two of us to get to know each other better.”
Julien wants to bite, but he can’t move his jaw to properly do so. The leather of the glove is warming in his mouth. If he had Occtis’s bare fingers for long enough, would they warm too?
No matter. He’s not going to leave another noble to be enraptured and left heartbroken by Thjazi Fang. Once was bad enough. The man inspires obsession; Julien can’t trust that the quality died with him.
“There you are,” Thjazi murmurs. “Hate me too much to leave me with your boy, is that right? You always were greedy. You don’t even like him, but you can’t let him go.”
The gape of the shirt is distracting. Occtis doesn’t seem to notice it at all, and Thjazi clearly doesn’t care—but Julien, his eyes are drawn back to the scar over and over again, to the stillness of the pulse and the chilled pallor of the body before him.
“Tell me,” Occtis murmurs, forcing Julien’s attention back to his green-glass eyes as the shadows twist at Julien’s wrists, running up his arms like water flowing backwards. “You’ll tell me. You’ll tell me everything. I want to know.” He takes his fingers out of Julien’s mouth and moves to sit at the edge of the bed, and the shadows pull the chair closer to him. This close, Julien can see the way he doesn’t breathe.
The shadows around him curl at his shoulders, pressing gently. They’re like hands, but everywhere. Like an embrace, but not. They wander up his forearms, trace over his veins.
“I don’t know how much you think about being dead. It’s very quiet.” Thjazi speaks, but it’s still Occtis watching from the eyes.
Shadows run over Julien’s ears for a moment, liquid and soft. They sink into his hair, cradle his skull.
“You don’t have to eat. You don’t have to drink. Which is good, since there’s nothing worth having. There’s nothing really real.”
Like a hand slipping under his collar, like ink spreading on a page, shadows trail down his chest. Julien’s breath hitches. The cool rush of them brings a chill to his skin.
“But you get so hungry,” Thjazi says. “I’m so fucking hungry, Davinos.”
“For what?” he manages unsteadily, swallowing a noise as the darkness wisps over his torso. It really is nothing like an embrace. An embrace has a beginning and an end.
“I want to know,” Occtis whispers. “I want to know.”
“For life,” Thjazi growls, and the shadows press a little harder over Julien’s chest, right above his heart. “For everything.”
The shadows get bolder, more tangible. Occtis sits behind his own eyes, ticking like a well-made clock, watching Julien with almost mechanical precision. He doesn’t miss a detail. “I want to know,” he says again, but he doesn’t prompt Julien to speak.
“I know,” Thjazi says, like he’s soothing an animal. “Let me show you.”
Like a fingertip trailing down his chest, a blade of pure shadow cuts down the middle of Julien’s shirt. It falls to more pieces than it should from just that. The edges seem to unravel, baring his chest. Without the barrier of the fabric, he can feel the way the shadows slide, velvet-soft on his skin.
Julien is breathing fast now, the danger of it and his ever-burning hate for Thjazi and the wild lust of being the only one who can do this driving him mad. He’s hard. No one has ever needed him like this, more than breathing, more than blinking. He can’t move. He doesn’t want to move.
“Are you angry that I’m here,” Thjazi asks, just a little mean, “or is it just like you imagined? You’ve never stopped thinking about me.” A tendril of shadow digs in at the base of Julien’s throat, sharp like teeth. Claws prick at the back of his neck. “You smile as I die, you spit on my corpse. You wanna know something great?” The body lurches forward, one hand coming to clasp Julien’s shoulder, the other reaching through the mass of shadows to press against his heart again.
“I didn’t think about you at all before this,” Thjazi rasps in his ear. “You’re just a warm body to me. But you take it so well.”
Julien makes a terrible sound, a high whining moan that he fails to bite back. The shadows around his torso surge like the tide, stroking and pinching and pressing sweet little bruises into his skin. His blood feels like magma in his veins, like he’s trying to chase the chill of death away with his own heartbeat.
The hand on his chest moves. “Subclavius,” Occtis murmurs, almost wondering. “Beneath the bone, just here. You’re breathing hard, thinking about it. Forced inspiration. I want to know.”
“Cold,” Julien rasps, but his shivering has nothing to do with the temperature.
“Warm,” Occtis whispers, leaning forward and laying his head at the junction of Julien’s neck and shoulder. His hair wisps against Julien’s jaw as he looks down between them. It can’t be comfortable, but he doesn’t seem to notice the way his back hunches at all.
Shadows run over Julien’s pants, swirling like water, but it’s Thjazi that reaches down and undoes the lacing with a gloved hand. Julien would say something rude about the ease of the action, but he’s too busy burying his face in Occtis’s hair and gasping as the hand wraps around his length. One easy stroke, over his smallclothes, and Julien very nearly tips over the edge like he’s the untouched one here.
“Not yet,” Thjazi teases.
“Not yet,” Occtis orders in his soft, wondering tone. “I need more. I don’t know yet.”
Julien snarls and bites his lip so hard he breaks the skin. The taste of his own blood is metallic and bright. A drop runs down his chin.
Occtis leans back slightly, taking in the details. He’s seeing Julien’s expression, the sweat on his brow, the moisture in his eyes. And he’s seeing the drop of blood that Julien can feel, leaving a cooling, sticky trail.
“Shit,” Thjazi breathes, finally thrown off. And then he says, “Shit, kid.”
Occtis has leaned close again, his eyes so bright they would look fevered if he was alive.
Julien doesn’t try to move away. Where would he go? His blood is burning, cool shadows roam his body, and Occtis told him not yet. Then he’s blinking as the body wrenches away from him, sprawling back on the bed once more.
“No,” Thjazi says firmly, planting the body’s hands on the mattress. “Yeah, you’re hungry. But you don’t eat him.”
“I want to—”
“You want to know. You’ll rip his throat out with your teeth, trying to know that much. It won’t get you full, it’ll just get him dead too.” The mouth twists, displeased. “We’re gonna do something else.” In the sheets, Thjazi clenches his fist.
Julien’s second shadow comes back to the fore, drawn in darker lines than the rest of the mess. He hadn’t realized it had faded until ephemeral hands free him from his pants and he’s sitting there in the candlelight with precum beading at the tip of his cock, as hard as he’s ever been in his life. The hand that wraps around him isn’t real, but it’s firmer than the shadows of the room. Julien keens, hips bucking as it strokes him root to tip. He misses the other body’s closeness—this is more vulnerable, more exposed. He couldn't hide even if he could think enough to want to. His hands flex against the armrests, wanting to reach. The bindings don’t ease.
“It has to, ngh, has to be like this,” Thjazi says, clenching his jaw on the words. “Stop fighting, kid. You'll just hurt him.”
“I don't care,” Julien groans, throwing his head back as the shadowy hand explores every inch of him. His eyelids flutter as something like a thumb circles the tip, spreading his precum around.
“Not helping.”
“You don't care,” Julien whines. He can feel Occtis's gaze burning into his skin, everything in him laid bare for the wizard to see. He wants to know. Julien can teach him, Julien can give him everything he needs, no matter what it is.
“Not helping,” Thjazi repeats, growling in a way that this throat shouldn't be able to. “He’ll care. So stop talking.”
Julien shudders, his whole body so alight with feeling that he should be able to see it. Thjazi clearly doesn't trust him to quiet down, because a smooth tongue of shadow licks into his mouth a moment later, distracting him thoroughly. He drools around it, through it, spilling out of his mouth in shining drops. It curls around his teeth.
“Better. Here, try this,” Thjazi mutters, and the candle goes out.
Julien would shout, but his mouth is full of velvet darkness and it's pouring down his throat, filling his lungs. There is no light in the room at all, no part of him untouched by the dark.
"I needed that to see," Occtis says, sounding frustrated, and Thjazi laughs.
"No, you don't," he explains patiently. "Open your eyes.”
Julien feels feral. Like he’s not a man at all. Like he’s a wound, being held open so the impurities can be flushed out. The shadows are so deep in his body that perhaps they can scour him clean, running over every inch of his skin. He has never been in such darkness as this.
Two points of light gleam, a muted glow in the overwhelming blackness. The eyes, Julien’s mind whispers, as gloved hands come forward to cup his face and hold him steady, denying him the dignity of looking away.
“Show me,” Occtis whispers, and the shadows around his cock ripple and twist, almost like suction, and Julien comes. It’s good, it hurts, the shadows working him through every pulse until there’s nothing left. He can’t twist away, not when he’s needed, and his breathing in the aftermath is loud and strange. The shadows withdraw from his mouth, curl down his neck to mingle with the cool leather gloves.
The cool eyes don’t waver, don’t blink. Lit from within like lanterns, the cool green is unreadable. Julien is still trying to catch his breath. They’re doll eyes, glass eyes. Is the body still the boy? Or is he another guest passing through, like Thjazi Fang, making a temporary home in the flesh?
“I should probably let you sleep,” Occtis murmurs, not letting go. His thumbs run over Julien’s cheekbones, more an examination than a caress. They linger at the edge of the dark circles beneath his eyes. “Shouldn’t I?”
Julien’s tongue is heavy in his mouth. The only light in the world comes from the eyes on him. He should counter, riposte, but nothing at all comes to his mind. His head is pleasant and empty.
“Julien doesn’t care about should,” Thjazi croons, hateful and fond. “And you still have questions.”
Occtis hums, considering, and there’s the barest moment where the glow of his eyes catches on his teeth, glints strange and otherworldly. “I’m really curious,” he sighs. “I want to know what it feels like. I need to know. I need you to tell me, to show me. Let’s try again, yeah? I have more ideas.”
Julien nods, blessedly hollow inside, and sinks into the dark.