Agony, torture, eternal pain. Festering boils drive you insane.
Midnight passes. The sickness that's taken hold of every shapeshifter fades away, causing every one to shift back involuntarily. When they awake, they'll be human again, if the shift itself doesn't wake them
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Fuck up. Failure. You did it again.
"Hail Mary," he shudders. "Hail Mary, full of grace--"
His mother would laugh at him if she could see him now. He's shaking and he doesn't know it. He has his eyes closed, all his focus centered on the pressure of contact with J's fingers, his focus breaking between J's words and the dozen stored phrases he's repeated to himself over the years, unintentional little savored pains rehashed until their poison programmed its way into his veins. He stumbles over them in fits and starts, mumbles that fade in and out underneath J’s anger and pain.
"Consiga las alas, o I'el ll le ahoga, usted poca mierda. Prometido para su décimosexto. Solamente mi hijo si su sangre es más negra que la mía."
He used to wonder what it would feel like, look like, seeing his mother from under the surface of the stream that ran through their back yard. Features reduced to a trembling blur. Fingers hot against his throat when everything else felt cold.
He kept himself awake at night listening for her steps on the stairs, half-believing she would get impatient with the waiting and just kill him before she knew if he was a proper demon or not. The way she laughed when he got sick, when his wings came ripping out for the first time--
She was happy, he likes to think, and it's the only time he can think of that she really sounded that way.
"Prenez-le. Laissez le reste de nous aller."
Adrian laughs quietly; that’s the closest approximation to the sound, at least. God. He's never going to get away from Michel. No matter where he goes or what he does, the man will always have a boot on his back and a whisper in his ear.
This is what you are.
He wants to die. He wants to die. "I'm sorry," he whispers. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Please, I'm sorry."
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No matter what.
No matter what.
He closes his eyes.
There, in the dark space just behind his eyelids, he can feel everything - the pulse coming down through his fingertips (adjust this for nonhuman norms - you know something about demons, don't you?-it's deep, almost subconscious, so terribly automatic), the tension, the slip from English. J's Spanish is fuzzy; his French is fine, and he remembers his Latin - it's not perfect (what is?), but it's enough to get the sense of things.
...it's enough.
It's enough.
Keep your eyes closed.
He exhales. Begins to draw Adrian in - not for a kiss this time, just getting him closer, getting his own hands on Adrian's body, looking for the knots of tension and the lines of balance that underpin the whole. Easy. Just - easy. Slowly. Threatless. Take away (take up) the weight of his body, take away (smooth out) the tremors in his limbs, slowly - keep everything below thresholds.
Adrian is trapped in a flashback. Where he is now, what's happening in the physical world around him, these are pushed aside. If J is careful (and he's always, always careful, always when he's in control of himself, and has that become the case here-?) he can relax the body without garnering resistance from the mind.
"It's all right," he says - quiet again, just beneath threshold, and if that were all it would take, he'd say it until the tenth plague. As it is he's pushing himself back against the wall, pulling Adrian down against him, control the situation-
Inhale.
French, he can do.
«You're a good soldier, Adrian.»
His voice is neither soft nor loud, feigned nor guessed. It just is. He's spoken as plenty of people - a Time Agent, a con man, Torchwood command. He's spoken as people's lovers when they were tortured past knowing the difference. As Jack Harkness when he was John Thane. This is just another voice, and words he has to say.
«And I thank you for your sacrifice.»
Mac told him. Thank God for guardian angels that didn't know tact, he supposed - that guy... Fuck all... Michael? Michel? Something. His commanding officer, anyway. He's the one who got him put in the camps.
«You were one of the valiant ones. Circumstance conspired to tear us apart. Your blood was as honorable as anyone's. Your heart was the strongest we could ask for. You were a good soldier, Adrian. Thank you for your sacrifice.»
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He was never a good soldier. He's never been good at fighting. He's better than average at killing people and covering his tracks, but he's never been a good soldier, and why Michel would tell him something they both know--
It's not him.
Thank you. How often has he been told that? Sincerely told that? He shifts, clinging one-armed to J and smelling the blood and fluid on the other man's clothes. Once upon a time those smells didn't bother him as much as they do now. Once upon a time--
It's not him.
How can words mean so much? He's wondered this off and on for his entire life. A bit of poetry, a turn of phrase can stick in one's mind until one has no idea where or why it became a part of the phrasal library, the construct of meaning and identity one dips into to paint the image of oneself into the world. Words, words, words--in the end that's all people are, skeletons of sentences disguised by flesh.
"Thank you," he whispers. Adrian presses his face against J's neck, unconsciously mimicking J's earlier position. How can you love someone you barely know? "Thank you," he says again, because that's all he can do. His own words have never been enough, said enough, said what he wanted when he wanted. He chuckles a little. "You speak French."
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«Passably.» He shifts when Adrian does, keeping contact, adjusting for new pressures and weights. This, at least, is so smooth as to seem natural. Then, this is what he's good at - bodies and systems of control. What happens now-
At least Adrian has already broken. ...both of them have, if he wants to be honest. That makes one less set event to dread.
For a moment they just breathe, as though it's the most they can do.
"It's our job to make something of the wreckage, isn't it?", he asks, after a moment Because that's all that's left - their four hands and all the broken things. "Because the universe doesn't care, much, who destroyed us or who we betrayed." He shifts into Adrian, lowering his head, resting his cheek against Adrian's hair. Oh, they've broken, both of them, but when this is the comfort available, it's what he'll rely on. "Or how much we still. Fucking. Love them."
He has to wrench the word out. Love, echoes his own mind, conversations past, things he believed but left unsaid; Like it's good for anything but an easy in for torture. Torture and apparently this, torture from torquere, to twist, and oh, they're twisted up in knots but they walked in that way.
...maybe there is some way out.
He doesn't know.
That's better than knowing there isn't.
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