Fic: The World Bereft (1/1)
Title: The World Bereft
Rating: R
Pairings/Characters: Adam/Master, mild Jacob/Esau, background Master/Doctor; Adam Monroe, The Master, Jacob, Esau
Word Count: 5,363
Summary: The immortal side of Purgatory. For aurilly, who requested ”Doctor Who/Heroes; Doctor Who/Lost; Adam/Master; The Master as the main DW character; Something with the Master and Jacob” for my help_chile Auction. General Series Spoilers for Doctor Who, Heroes, and Lost.
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot.
Author’s Notes: To the wonderful aurilly: First, as I’m sure you can guess -- I am desperately sorry that this took so disgustingly long. Really and truly. Secondly, I’m going to apologize in advance for the fact that absolutely nothing of consequence actually happens in this story. You said you just wanted to see the characters interact: I think I took that idea and ran too far with it, really, leaving plot and realism and actual-factual usefulness behind in the dust, and I thus ended up with just a collection of snippets, little bits of mostly dark and angsty randomness, with a touch of cracky tongue-in-cheek black humor for good measure. Hopefully, the character-study-esque approach will be to your liking, nonetheless.
The World Bereft
His mouth is full; he barely swallows, lips still slick with the juice of his orange when he speaks, doesn’t turn to take in his audience -- they’re beyond social niceties, now, and if a bit of pulp sticks in his teeth, the horizon doesn’t notice; the rising sun won’t mind.
“I take it you’ve seen them?” The sigh comes predictably as he feels the world sift, the sand move; as his brother’s body settles beside him, and only half his brother’s soul filters through the space between.
“What gave me away?”
Jacob huffs, dry amusement set within his skin; tries not to think too far on how his brother’s eyes are millennia removed from this moment, how they used to shine like the water in the light. “Sun’s barely up. You were never much of a morning person.”
The chuckle he gets in return is brittle, and Jacob -- he doesn’t quite remember what it means to really laugh.
“It seems almost pointless to ask the question,” the darker of them, the nameless thing that slinks -- he speaks, and it’s the voice that always ruins it, because that voice belongs to a piece of Jacob’s own self, his own heart from a time far from him, now; a time long since lost.
“You’re going to ask anyway, though,” Jacob says; it’s unspoken, the question, but it’s true -- it echoes in its own way.
Jacob whistles through the purse of his lips as his sighs, the sound thin and delicate, slain on the breeze. “I didn’t bring them.”
His brother snorts his disbelief -- and that, that’s his brother. “Of course not.”
“Why would I?”
“The same reason.” Jacob can feel the burn that accompanies the chill, the accusation in that tone that simmers, resents in a way that only blood knows, only blood can. “The only reason.”
“Believe me, brother,” and it’s cynical, sad when he gives the word its voice; “if I were keen to prove you wrong, those two would be the very last exhibits I’d present for my defense.”
__________________________
He wakes up under, beneath -- it’s how these things always seem to work, how he always seems to come back to waking after the dark itself turns dead; undead.
This time, though, it’s different. This time, it isn’t dirt, isn’t sand or snow or the crushing weight of water burying him, keeping him close and still.
This time, he’s falling -- fallen -- instead of caved in upon; this time, he’s got himself a weight that’s warm, that’s curved and hard and soft and long and that moves in around, breathes steady where he gasps, just as soon as he knows that there’s air to take in.
This time, he’s got himself a goddamned body on top of him, and fuck if he doesn’t know before he sees, can’t tell from the cocky laugh as he struggles, lungs heaving and limbs flailing for freedom, release; if he can’t tell whose thighs keep him close to the ground, because he’s been under them before, and he knows them well enough.
He doesn’t look into the face that’s waiting for him, doesn’t take in the smirk; no -- Adam merely stares at the sky, and curses the fact that it’s so fucking murky, so fucking still.
There’s a silence, then, that’s no silence at all, and for the first time in too many years, too many centuries, Adam hears breaths at half his pace, a drumbeat of double his heart, and it’s madness and coldness and friction and heat, and he’s been gone far too long, been out of the game -- he’d thought he could outrun time and space.
He’d thought he could outrun.
“What in the bloody fuck are you doing here?” he manages to spit with the kind of irritation, the kind of disdain that he feels, though it sounds only half as passionate, half as dire as it is in truth.
“Should be obvious, shouldn’t it?” The legs holding him hostage, the weight that keeps him down -- he feels the roll of muscles, the bend of knees and a withdrawal that doesn’t mean freedom, can’t mean release. “Retribution.” He closes his eyes, tries not to focus too much on the feel of being back here -- different but the same, sprawled beneath, beside a body made of stardust and hate, the salt inside each breath different from the smoke of shared cigarettes, the taste of cheap whiskey on their lips; different, but servicing the same purpose, filling the same need.
He feels the eyes on him, doesn’t pay them the heed they demand; he’s not afraid. “We all get our just rewards in the end, Adam.”
Adam heaves a deep, withering sigh when his captor stands, when his steps shuffle; he turns to follow the retreat, sees feet that stop at the precipice, the peak, and there’s only sky beyond.
“Well, I’ll give them their due credit,” and the voice is caught up in the wind as it travels, sinks low toward Adam’s ears. “I don’t think I could think up a more effective means of making me absolutely miserable. Stranding me in the fucking tropics with the likes of you.”
Adam huffs at that, but doesn’t disagree.
“Wonderful to see you again too, Harold.” He smacks his lips; remembers a Box bathed in cannibal red from a year that everyone who was worth anything managed to forget; can feel his knees on hard wood, can still taste a Time Traveler on the back of his teeth if he thinks on it hard -- one of those things that never goes away.
He remembers that satisfied grin, too; remembers it, because it knows no age, fears no death.
“Now,” he says, cocking his head and pinning Adam with a condescending little pout, lips too full, and that’s another thing -- the wrap, the indecent spread of his mouth -- that doesn’t leave; “we both know what’s not my name.”
Adam hates it, where it’s burned in the back of his mind -- back and front and sides and everywhere there’s space, overlapping where the fit gets tight; he hates it, but he remembers the sound choked from his throat, remembers it shamefully, feels his cock twitch at the thought.
Master.
He closes his eyes, breathes deeply: he’s done unspeakable things, he’s been more than a monster -- he doesn’t deserve anyone’s mercy.
But... damnit, even he doesn’t quite deserve this.
__________________________
His footprints fill just after he makes them, sand wiping away the traces of him, the scars he leaves behind. He remembers a time where he’d have wished for that kind of simplicity, that kind of swift erasure, quick realignment of every hint at constancy, every trace of decay.
Adam doesn’t know what he wishes for, now.
He’s a little breathless, a little worn when he reaches the shoreline, stops at the small camp of long logs and a pit of flame where a fresh catch is steaming, ripe upon the air as he inhales meat and death. The blond man tending the food doesn’t look his way, speaks instead while he pokes at his fish.
“You’ve come a long way.”
Adam feels a little dazed, a little lost -- he takes the moment to wonder, for an instant, where he may or may not be. “Have I?”
It’s a question he hopes has no answer; there are better riddles to solve.
“I’m Adam,” he says, settles on the log opposite the man where he cooks, unfazed by Adam’s appearance, perhaps just a little perturbed to be interrupted, put-upon; the wood beneath his weight gives a bit, wet and rotten at the core.
“I know who you are.” It should sound ominous, as a reply to such a simple introduction, but it doesn’t. Not quite. Things stopped being ominous too long ago, now, for them to start again in the face of a simple man preparing his breakfast of fish.
“What are you?” And it’s the what that shows that he’s learned in his years, knows when something is larger than who.
Adam, himself, is larger than who.
The man’s lips might quirk; it might be smoke and the early light. “My name is Jacob.”
Adam stretches a hand outward, points toward the whitening meat against the bone as Jacob removes the fish carefully from the heat. “Carp?” he asks hopefully.
Blue eyes pin him down as Jacob shrugs, offering out his catch with a reluctant hand, fingers curling in on the half-raw fillet, caught slick in the sunlight against the veins of a leaf too green, too smooth; “Close enough.”
__________________________
The night is still, the air is still; he’s watching his reflection and it’s too constant, doesn’t waver -- it’s too far to reflect the way his fingers tremble, the way his teeth try to chatter in the cool.
“I know what it feels like.” Sometimes, he can’t tell if the voices he hears are in his head, outside of it, somewhere in between. He loses sounds sometimes, beneath the stagnant rattle of the beat, drowned in the roar of the emptiness, the void of the Eye of Harmony in his dreams.
He draws a breath, and it shudders; he remembers a hand in his own, then -- a friend, and a tightness in his chest that shivers through the tapping, the rhythm: cannot stop it, but won’t leave it unscathed.
“Not to recognize your own face.” He doesn’t remember all of the faces he’s worn. He doesn’t remember what skin looks like, the shade of it in the Gallifreyan sun -- he doesn’t remember; skips a stone into the water as the last words are spoken -- real, he thinks, maybe -- just so that the mirror will shatter, just so that the luck will break.
“Not to see yourself in you own eyes.”
He blinks, looks to his side: the lines in the face staring everywhere but back at him are deep, cleaved far and raised high, and it’s alien, all of it; he’s so very, very tired.
“Can you find yourself in him?”
In a moment, an instant, longer than it took for his planet to burn: he sees it -- sees mousy brown and a skinny suit for the blink of an eye before it’s gone, before there’s less a smile and more a grimace on the immortal features trained upon his own.
He’s never met a soul who’s know more years than he; he wishes now that he never had.
“It’s less a matter of rules and loopholes, you know,” the scratch of the other man’s voice cuts harsh, thick and rough, and for reasons unknown, he can feel a bony hand at his chest, just above his thundering hearts, blood-stained and brittle between wild eyes, and he’s chained now as tight as he’s ever been -- imprisoned for eternity -- and now...
Now, he wishes the fucking Doctor was here to tend his wounds.
“I keep him alive because he knows the man beneath the faces,” the man in the black, he confesses like a sinner; and it eases something young and frightened inside the Master’s chest, something left beneath another sky, to know that it’s not just him, that he’s not the only one too selfish to be saved; “Because even as I change, he never does.”
The four thrums pound hard beneath his ribs, deeper now than they’ve ever been, and once again, the water’s still.
__________________________
“This is absolutely pointless,” Adam groans, deeper than the strain of the sticks, the earth beneath his feet as they walk -- interminable, the Seventh Circle spiraled into the sixth, and higher, lower, ever on. “We’re walking in circles.”
“Well, it’s hell, isn’t it?” comes the witty, weary reply -- and Adam wonders, sometimes, if he believes this man is really from a world he can’t fathom, in a place too far to see; wonders if a place that far has its own sorts of hell. “It’s not like we’ve anything better to do.”
Adam scuffs his bare toes into the soil, knows it’s colder than it should be, even in the shade. He doesn’t believe in hell.
“Oh, well, now that’s brilliant, isn’t it?” Adam looks up, sees the Master scrambling quick down the little incline, the soft bank of a stream; he doesn’t see it at first, not until he tops the last crest before the fall, but then it’s there, obvious: it’s a fucking Magical Cavern of Light, smack between the beach camp with the porn mags and the Egyptian Temple with the torches, just to the right of Hippieville, where, to his endless disappointment, there was absolutely no hash -- or any mind-altering substance at all, for that matter -- to be had.
Not that anyone would know it, given the mindfuck he’s witnessing just now; he thinks he’d be more comfortable with the Cave of Wonders yawning in front of him, if he could blame it on a bad trip.
“I’m thinking Time Vortex, what do you reckon?” The Master asks, as if he expects Adam to have any sort of genuine opinion. Opinions, he’d learned early on, were usually a waste of time.
“Time Vortex?”
“Heart of a TARDIS,” the Master answers, like it’s common knowledge, eyes wide and lips bowed. “Kills and creates,” he adds with wonder as he looks the opening up and down, seems to move, to glow with less of the reflection of the light, and more of the light itself. “Gorgeous fucking thing,” he breathes, hands caressing the jagged planes of rock, the flow of the water breaking sharp around his knees; “right here. And these bastards don’t even know it, do they?”
Adam watches for a moment as the Master leans his head against the stone, closes his eyes and simply breathes, before he formulates an appropriate response.
“You’re mad, aren’t you?” Adam says with the kind of level certainty that only insanity can prompt, can maintain. “You’re just... mad.”
The Master turns back toward him, half lit by the golden beams, half cast in shadow: “In a manner of speaking, perhaps,” and Adam blinks; swears he can see the skeleton, the bones of the man at his side as he smiles, bleak: white lines wrapped tight with tendon under skin -- he shivers in time with the tap of those fingers, steady yet manic in common time; “but it really does make everything so much more interesting.”
__________________________
After so many lifetimes alone on this Island, Jacob’s learned to let most things go; let most things slide.
After so many lifetimes with his brother’s black-souled doppelgänger dogging his steps, Jacob’s also learned to be a little suspicious of people in general.
And just as a rule, Jacob really doesn’t like it when people touch his fucking bottle of cork-stopped malevolent-wine.
“What are you doing?” Jacob asks, stilling newly-spun thread between his fingertips as he watches the figure, sees through the dark where the Being -- not a Man -- eyes his tapestry, fingers the dangling fibers on the loom, stares hard at the lines that mean more than their ends:
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
“Just taking a peek,” comes the answer, flippant and sharp; “keep your sandals on.”
Jacob almost scowls -- refuses to give this interloper the pleasure whilst he runs his fingers across Jacob’s possessions, sullies Jacob’s things; he can only think one thought as his eyes skim the glass, the stone and sand that the Being studies, sneers down upon without comprehension or respect at carvings, at crafts and the line of carafes stuffed closed -- one thought: time obeys him, in this place, and him alone.
The shatter of the glass against rock, the slosh and spill of the deep red-black menace held inside; Jacob barely dares to blink, doesn’t move -- all things end. All things.
“Whoops,” the creature who calls himself Master, the creature who changes faces and steals worlds and crushes realities and takes, controls, condemns -- too much like Jacob, and the lost half of Jacob’s soul; the creature smirks, licks the dark stain of the liquid from his hands where they bleed, where the shards cut and ripped, mixed blood with wine and danger, mingling too fast with a beat Jacob can’t recognize, doesn’t know how to restrain.
Only the dead see the end.
__________________________
The Man, the Monster in the Black; there’s something about him that Adam doesn’t like.
“How long?” he asks, appearing from nowhere to stand, casting shadows over where Adam crouches, hands cupped in the clear water of the shoreline, drops leaking from the cracks between his fingers, falling full from his hands as he breaks his hold, cranes his neck upward to squint into the sun, the only brightness in the face of the Dark.
“Excuse me?”
The Man looks down at him, and Adam can feel the scorn, the pity. He resents it, and he wishes, more than anything, that he had the drive, the rage to care anymore -- to act and crush and burn. “How far are you from where you belong?”
Adam lets the heat of the sun burn red into his pale skin for a few moments longer before he turns back, gathers another handful of water and raises it to his chin -- dips his lips below the stagnant surface before he splashes it over his face, lets the droplets fall; he doesn’t answer.
He doesn’t know.
The sandpaper-scratch of steps on the beach churns in his stomach, just a little -- joints popping and bones creaking as another body folds, kneels next to him; as rough hands trace around the sand and pinch, cup and scoop a handful of the grains, let them fall like rain, particle by matte-gleaming particle back whence they came.
“Ashes to ashes,” and it’s mocking, and Adam’s flesh itches with the implications, sifts like dust under his fingertips. It makes his throat tight, and it stretches, aches in his skin, shivers heavy and swift in the cage of his chest, the muscle worn and too old, too taxed. It’s salt in a wound, simmers without the cleanse of the ocean in his veins -- he remembers the pieces of himself, the dissolution of his very breath as breath came shallow, then scarce, as he fell apart and blew away.
He belongs in the dust, the sand and the cinders. He belongs to the dust unto dust.
He never did believe in hell.
He thinks that maybe now, he does.
__________________________
Admittedly, he doesn’t really think it through. Consequences haven’t been deadly for him in a very long time -- weren’t, until the end, and even that was only illusory, short-lived.
It’s the incessant talking, really, the irritating nag of that voice -- that’s what pushes him over, breaks his resolve: that’s what has him taking hold of unsuspecting arms and wrestling a deathless alien into the glowing pool of an island underworld, holding him down until the struggling stops, until the end comes for the endless.
Really, considering the places he finds himself these days, he should write a fucking book.
He watches the body with a certain satisfaction, and a shallow well of remorse as it floats toward the mouth of the cavern, the cave; and he remembers suddenly, seeing that open mouth and those frozen features bathed in light, what he once saw in a rising politician who, with a shot or three in his system, he’d dared to buy a drink.
He remembers what he saw that had him naked on his knees that very same night, a slave to his Master, mouth fucked raw in ways no ordinary man could have survived.
The splutter, the cry that breaks the recollections startles him, steals him from the memories -- reminds him quick, before they fade, that it wasn’t just him with his mouth full, his throat slick and sore over the course of those endless, depraved London nights.
“Oh, you devil!” And the Master, he shouts it with the perverse sort of glee Adam can remember him dancing around an airship with, that Adam can remember in his eyes between the kinds of thrusts that left imprints, bruises in the shape of a spacecraft counsel, concentric circles that spelled names and words that bled and seared.
“Pity you’ve already forgotten the countless benefits of my respiratory bypass system,” he adds with a lecherous wink, and Adam makes the conscious effort not to look any lower, not to glance at anything further down than the deep heave of his chest under soaked clothing, thin and transparent against the skin.
He tenses when the Master’s heavy hand rests on his shoulder -- congratulatory, but laced with a threat: “Good try, though.”
__________________________
He’s lit up in stars that mean nothing, are nothing; that could -- should -- be dying, should be snuffed beneath his palm.
“I know what it feels like,” and he doesn’t startle, doesn’t shift his gaze as he catalogs systems, galaxies, worlds he’s known and world’s he’s taken, will taken, took once and left for ruin except that they flourished, they endured.
He endures.
It’s less than it should be; it’s deeper than he’s made to stand.
“To never be able to go home.”
The man beside him: curls of his hair stick close to the skin, strands of silver and soot clinging in the spray of the sea, the rise of invisible smoke, and he will never understand what anyone could see in this planet, these creatures; he will never understand.
The Master smiles, feels small -- boundless. “You have no idea.”
__________________________
He does this every morning; has done this every morning since the mornings stopped looking different, feeling new.
Sometimes, it’s buildings. Sometimes, it’s a knife. A bow. A gun. Sometimes it’s arsenic, or strychnine. Sometimes it’s fire and rage.
Here, it’s usually the water. Here, he sinks until his corpse floats on top of the surf, the foam of the morning tide.
He feels a hand -- harsh grasp that pulls him by the skin of his neck and yanks with fingertips that blossom, rupture pain and blood beneath the surface as they tug him upwards until his lungs are filled with air again instead of saltwater.
Jacob doesn’t say anything, just pulls him; Adam’s too off-balance to do much else but thrash half-heartedly as Jacob lowers him close, snaps him whiplash-quick above the surface of the sea, dangles him between release and ever-present, ever-cycling resurrection.
“Do you really want that?” Jacob hisses, like it’s a curse, like it’s a sin.
“Yes,” Adam answers, like it’s the truth, because it is.
Jacob doesn’t say anything; drops him like a leaf on the wind and lets him drift until the sun breaks the line of the horizon.
So Adam drifts.
__________________________
The practical effects of immortality have, historically, been lost on Adam -- they’re there, and they’re many, but they’re inconsequential.
Sometimes, he gets distracted. His instincts, the grace it took to fight, to inhabit armor and metal and a blade in his hand like a second skin, an extension of self -- it’s faded, distant now; he sees the leaves, cherry blossoms in his mind, branches like arrows and smiles in the sky, sometimes -- he sees blood in the colors of the soil, the clumps of the sand, and he wonders about things that will never be. He gets distracted.
He’s not the man he used to be; he’s not even the man he was before that.
So he doesn’t see sometimes where they’re walking, he doesn’t remember, sometimes, that there’s anyone there with him at all, that the steps he picks up next to him, just behind -- that they don’t belong to dainty feet, pale features, an open face.
That they may, instead, belong to a sadistic, psychotic, universally-renowned moron with a penchant of grating on Adam’s time-hardened nerves in ways that he’s never known.
In fact, he often tries actively to forget that particular fact; not that it’s proven itself worth much of the effort, for all of the good that it’s done him. The fucker’s lucky he gives head like no other, else Adam would have run him through the rest of his bizarre nine-lives within their first five minutes on this godforsaken rock.
Either way, he doesn’t see the foot that’s poised inside his stride, that catches at his ankle and sends him tumbling, catching the back of his head on a particularly treacherous outcropping, sending blood into the water until the gold stains amber, until the clear clouds over and he drops under the currents, the subtle little waves.
He sees, wet with distortion and what’s left of the ripples of impact; he sees a shock of blond and a flash of white, and then nothing.
It’s disgusting, how familiar the sensation really is.
He comes to in the middle of spluttering, his arms ahead of his brain as he propels himself back to the surface, to the exaggerated ‘Awww’ of juvenile disappointment that reaches his ears as soon as he gasps in thick, humid air; as soon as he shakes enough drenched hair from his line of sight to see the twisted grin waiting for him on that bastard’s face.
“I can’t die, you idiot!” he yells in the face of that smirking leer; and whatever that man’s a Master of, it’s absolutely nothing worth keeping.
“You can hardly blame me for trying!” And there’s a sparkle, a crazed sort of gleam in those eyes as Adam paws at the pebbles, the damp dirt at the bank.
He’s pretty sure he could find someone else who could suck him off satisfactorily, if he looked hard enough. Worst case scenario, he goes back to his own right hand.
__________________________
It’s strange, how they can stand with rusted clubs on rutted ground, swinging and noting marks, holes -- how they can play a goddamned game of golf without either of them knowing so much as the other’s name.
The dimpled white orbs flying through the air, soaring; like severed heads and futures cut short, paradoxes and pretty voices from the End of the Universe itself. He can remember the screams -- theirs, his own as the Chameleon Arch took hold of him, reduced and condensed him into something less, something human. He can hear the whistle, the whisper of their words: Mister Master, like the wind as he walks, as he swings, as he plays at an existence beyond the penance he will serve.
He misses the shot as his opponent sinks it true, and it shoots through him, irrational, unbound: it’s a rage he thought he’d lost, thought he’d let fly one last time and could then let go of; a rage that had killed him, but had died with him, too.
The lightning gathers, builds in his palms; strikes for an instant, illuminates the body, the flesh of his victim in fluorescence until there’s nothing where the Man in Black had once stood -- nothing but smoke and crackling static.
He feels something drop within him, something swell and burst and grow -- it dies quick, though, when the cloud of smoke sparks hard and fast, sends a chill through him before it swoops forward and dissipates in an instant, leaving the terrible, twisted features of the Man more than a Man before him, staring wrathful down upon him: angry god.
“Shocked,” he chuckles darkly, and the Master almost deigns to tremble as his better -- for the round -- his foe walks away, swaggers toward the hole and retrieves the ball before tossing it into the air and evaporating, the cloud of Him skittering off above the trees before gravity stakes its claim and the ball falls back to Earth.
__________________________
They meet beneath a tree, outside the charred remains of a cabin; they meet outside of time, beneath a tree.
“So,” Adam starts, his back against the bark, the scent of burning still in the air, though the ground beneath him is cool; “it seems we stand at an impasse.”
The Master bends at the waist, falls gracelessly, deliberately to the dirt and scatters a puff of debris about them with the impact of his weight. “We always did do hate sex rather well.”
“Mmm,” and Adam lets the rough texture of the tree dig hard into his scalp as he leans his head back and closes his eyes, breathes in a world he left behind for the traces of it, the echoes of it in the here and now. “I think I’ll need to be a bit less sober for that.”
He feels the breath on his neck, at his ear; it’s cool enough to feign a shiver, but he doesn’t need the excuse. “That Jacob character’s got a stash of vile looking wine,” the Master murmurs, hot and low, and Adam can’t help the way his lips curl, can’t help the way his groin tightens -- can’t help sense memory, or the hand upon his thigh.
His eyes snap open as he processes the suggestion for more than just the promise, the lilt of satisfaction searing in his gut. “Are you suggesting we fuck in his strange and mysterious foot?” he asks, eyes narrowed, because that’s just wrong, even for them. Even for here.
“Well, unless you want to get sand everywhere,” the Master shrugs, stands, and they always were a bit wrong, really; more than just a bit.
“Point,” Adam concedes, letting the hand held out to him fold into his own, uses the leverage to propel himself to his feet. “Lead on.”
__________________________
“So.”
Jacob looks up into the face of his brother, sees the way his lower lip is caught between his teeth, the way his eyes are crinkled at the centers instead of the sides: a tell that has nothing to do with the game spread out between them.
“So,” Jacob repeats, a little leading, a little haughty -- there’s only one place this conversation can go. He takes his turn, throws his sticks.
“About...” and his brother swallows, watches too close when Jacob moves his pawns too far, too soon; tosses again and stops cold. He looks up once his markers are in play.
“Yes?”
They catch each other’s eyes for the longest space that either of them has ever forgotten to breathe; they can hear, if they try, the shuffle-and-moan of the cretins who’ve infiltrated their Island home, and Jacob thinks again on how hard it might be to trick the buffoons onto the submarine, with the coordinates set straight for Tunisia. Or Siberia.
His brother breaks the eye contact first, studying too many of Jacob’s pieces near The House of Re-Aton, before tossing two blanks; he moves, scowls, speaks his piece:
“I stand corrected.”
Jacob smiles, and takes the game.
Rating: R
Pairings/Characters: Adam/Master, mild Jacob/Esau, background Master/Doctor; Adam Monroe, The Master, Jacob, Esau
Word Count: 5,363
Summary: The immortal side of Purgatory. For aurilly, who requested ”Doctor Who/Heroes; Doctor Who/Lost; Adam/Master; The Master as the main DW character; Something with the Master and Jacob” for my help_chile Auction. General Series Spoilers for Doctor Who, Heroes, and Lost.
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot.
Author’s Notes: To the wonderful aurilly: First, as I’m sure you can guess -- I am desperately sorry that this took so disgustingly long. Really and truly. Secondly, I’m going to apologize in advance for the fact that absolutely nothing of consequence actually happens in this story. You said you just wanted to see the characters interact: I think I took that idea and ran too far with it, really, leaving plot and realism and actual-factual usefulness behind in the dust, and I thus ended up with just a collection of snippets, little bits of mostly dark and angsty randomness, with a touch of cracky tongue-in-cheek black humor for good measure. Hopefully, the character-study-esque approach will be to your liking, nonetheless.
The World Bereft
His mouth is full; he barely swallows, lips still slick with the juice of his orange when he speaks, doesn’t turn to take in his audience -- they’re beyond social niceties, now, and if a bit of pulp sticks in his teeth, the horizon doesn’t notice; the rising sun won’t mind.
“I take it you’ve seen them?” The sigh comes predictably as he feels the world sift, the sand move; as his brother’s body settles beside him, and only half his brother’s soul filters through the space between.
“What gave me away?”
Jacob huffs, dry amusement set within his skin; tries not to think too far on how his brother’s eyes are millennia removed from this moment, how they used to shine like the water in the light. “Sun’s barely up. You were never much of a morning person.”
The chuckle he gets in return is brittle, and Jacob -- he doesn’t quite remember what it means to really laugh.
“It seems almost pointless to ask the question,” the darker of them, the nameless thing that slinks -- he speaks, and it’s the voice that always ruins it, because that voice belongs to a piece of Jacob’s own self, his own heart from a time far from him, now; a time long since lost.
“You’re going to ask anyway, though,” Jacob says; it’s unspoken, the question, but it’s true -- it echoes in its own way.
Jacob whistles through the purse of his lips as his sighs, the sound thin and delicate, slain on the breeze. “I didn’t bring them.”
His brother snorts his disbelief -- and that, that’s his brother. “Of course not.”
“Why would I?”
“The same reason.” Jacob can feel the burn that accompanies the chill, the accusation in that tone that simmers, resents in a way that only blood knows, only blood can. “The only reason.”
“Believe me, brother,” and it’s cynical, sad when he gives the word its voice; “if I were keen to prove you wrong, those two would be the very last exhibits I’d present for my defense.”
__________________________
He wakes up under, beneath -- it’s how these things always seem to work, how he always seems to come back to waking after the dark itself turns dead; undead.
This time, though, it’s different. This time, it isn’t dirt, isn’t sand or snow or the crushing weight of water burying him, keeping him close and still.
This time, he’s falling -- fallen -- instead of caved in upon; this time, he’s got himself a weight that’s warm, that’s curved and hard and soft and long and that moves in around, breathes steady where he gasps, just as soon as he knows that there’s air to take in.
This time, he’s got himself a goddamned body on top of him, and fuck if he doesn’t know before he sees, can’t tell from the cocky laugh as he struggles, lungs heaving and limbs flailing for freedom, release; if he can’t tell whose thighs keep him close to the ground, because he’s been under them before, and he knows them well enough.
He doesn’t look into the face that’s waiting for him, doesn’t take in the smirk; no -- Adam merely stares at the sky, and curses the fact that it’s so fucking murky, so fucking still.
There’s a silence, then, that’s no silence at all, and for the first time in too many years, too many centuries, Adam hears breaths at half his pace, a drumbeat of double his heart, and it’s madness and coldness and friction and heat, and he’s been gone far too long, been out of the game -- he’d thought he could outrun time and space.
He’d thought he could outrun.
“What in the bloody fuck are you doing here?” he manages to spit with the kind of irritation, the kind of disdain that he feels, though it sounds only half as passionate, half as dire as it is in truth.
“Should be obvious, shouldn’t it?” The legs holding him hostage, the weight that keeps him down -- he feels the roll of muscles, the bend of knees and a withdrawal that doesn’t mean freedom, can’t mean release. “Retribution.” He closes his eyes, tries not to focus too much on the feel of being back here -- different but the same, sprawled beneath, beside a body made of stardust and hate, the salt inside each breath different from the smoke of shared cigarettes, the taste of cheap whiskey on their lips; different, but servicing the same purpose, filling the same need.
He feels the eyes on him, doesn’t pay them the heed they demand; he’s not afraid. “We all get our just rewards in the end, Adam.”
Adam heaves a deep, withering sigh when his captor stands, when his steps shuffle; he turns to follow the retreat, sees feet that stop at the precipice, the peak, and there’s only sky beyond.
“Well, I’ll give them their due credit,” and the voice is caught up in the wind as it travels, sinks low toward Adam’s ears. “I don’t think I could think up a more effective means of making me absolutely miserable. Stranding me in the fucking tropics with the likes of you.”
Adam huffs at that, but doesn’t disagree.
“Wonderful to see you again too, Harold.” He smacks his lips; remembers a Box bathed in cannibal red from a year that everyone who was worth anything managed to forget; can feel his knees on hard wood, can still taste a Time Traveler on the back of his teeth if he thinks on it hard -- one of those things that never goes away.
He remembers that satisfied grin, too; remembers it, because it knows no age, fears no death.
“Now,” he says, cocking his head and pinning Adam with a condescending little pout, lips too full, and that’s another thing -- the wrap, the indecent spread of his mouth -- that doesn’t leave; “we both know what’s not my name.”
Adam hates it, where it’s burned in the back of his mind -- back and front and sides and everywhere there’s space, overlapping where the fit gets tight; he hates it, but he remembers the sound choked from his throat, remembers it shamefully, feels his cock twitch at the thought.
Master.
He closes his eyes, breathes deeply: he’s done unspeakable things, he’s been more than a monster -- he doesn’t deserve anyone’s mercy.
But... damnit, even he doesn’t quite deserve this.
__________________________
His footprints fill just after he makes them, sand wiping away the traces of him, the scars he leaves behind. He remembers a time where he’d have wished for that kind of simplicity, that kind of swift erasure, quick realignment of every hint at constancy, every trace of decay.
Adam doesn’t know what he wishes for, now.
He’s a little breathless, a little worn when he reaches the shoreline, stops at the small camp of long logs and a pit of flame where a fresh catch is steaming, ripe upon the air as he inhales meat and death. The blond man tending the food doesn’t look his way, speaks instead while he pokes at his fish.
“You’ve come a long way.”
Adam feels a little dazed, a little lost -- he takes the moment to wonder, for an instant, where he may or may not be. “Have I?”
It’s a question he hopes has no answer; there are better riddles to solve.
“I’m Adam,” he says, settles on the log opposite the man where he cooks, unfazed by Adam’s appearance, perhaps just a little perturbed to be interrupted, put-upon; the wood beneath his weight gives a bit, wet and rotten at the core.
“I know who you are.” It should sound ominous, as a reply to such a simple introduction, but it doesn’t. Not quite. Things stopped being ominous too long ago, now, for them to start again in the face of a simple man preparing his breakfast of fish.
“What are you?” And it’s the what that shows that he’s learned in his years, knows when something is larger than who.
Adam, himself, is larger than who.
The man’s lips might quirk; it might be smoke and the early light. “My name is Jacob.”
Adam stretches a hand outward, points toward the whitening meat against the bone as Jacob removes the fish carefully from the heat. “Carp?” he asks hopefully.
Blue eyes pin him down as Jacob shrugs, offering out his catch with a reluctant hand, fingers curling in on the half-raw fillet, caught slick in the sunlight against the veins of a leaf too green, too smooth; “Close enough.”
__________________________
The night is still, the air is still; he’s watching his reflection and it’s too constant, doesn’t waver -- it’s too far to reflect the way his fingers tremble, the way his teeth try to chatter in the cool.
“I know what it feels like.” Sometimes, he can’t tell if the voices he hears are in his head, outside of it, somewhere in between. He loses sounds sometimes, beneath the stagnant rattle of the beat, drowned in the roar of the emptiness, the void of the Eye of Harmony in his dreams.
He draws a breath, and it shudders; he remembers a hand in his own, then -- a friend, and a tightness in his chest that shivers through the tapping, the rhythm: cannot stop it, but won’t leave it unscathed.
“Not to recognize your own face.” He doesn’t remember all of the faces he’s worn. He doesn’t remember what skin looks like, the shade of it in the Gallifreyan sun -- he doesn’t remember; skips a stone into the water as the last words are spoken -- real, he thinks, maybe -- just so that the mirror will shatter, just so that the luck will break.
“Not to see yourself in you own eyes.”
He blinks, looks to his side: the lines in the face staring everywhere but back at him are deep, cleaved far and raised high, and it’s alien, all of it; he’s so very, very tired.
“Can you find yourself in him?”
In a moment, an instant, longer than it took for his planet to burn: he sees it -- sees mousy brown and a skinny suit for the blink of an eye before it’s gone, before there’s less a smile and more a grimace on the immortal features trained upon his own.
He’s never met a soul who’s know more years than he; he wishes now that he never had.
“It’s less a matter of rules and loopholes, you know,” the scratch of the other man’s voice cuts harsh, thick and rough, and for reasons unknown, he can feel a bony hand at his chest, just above his thundering hearts, blood-stained and brittle between wild eyes, and he’s chained now as tight as he’s ever been -- imprisoned for eternity -- and now...
Now, he wishes the fucking Doctor was here to tend his wounds.
“I keep him alive because he knows the man beneath the faces,” the man in the black, he confesses like a sinner; and it eases something young and frightened inside the Master’s chest, something left beneath another sky, to know that it’s not just him, that he’s not the only one too selfish to be saved; “Because even as I change, he never does.”
The four thrums pound hard beneath his ribs, deeper now than they’ve ever been, and once again, the water’s still.
__________________________
“This is absolutely pointless,” Adam groans, deeper than the strain of the sticks, the earth beneath his feet as they walk -- interminable, the Seventh Circle spiraled into the sixth, and higher, lower, ever on. “We’re walking in circles.”
“Well, it’s hell, isn’t it?” comes the witty, weary reply -- and Adam wonders, sometimes, if he believes this man is really from a world he can’t fathom, in a place too far to see; wonders if a place that far has its own sorts of hell. “It’s not like we’ve anything better to do.”
Adam scuffs his bare toes into the soil, knows it’s colder than it should be, even in the shade. He doesn’t believe in hell.
“Oh, well, now that’s brilliant, isn’t it?” Adam looks up, sees the Master scrambling quick down the little incline, the soft bank of a stream; he doesn’t see it at first, not until he tops the last crest before the fall, but then it’s there, obvious: it’s a fucking Magical Cavern of Light, smack between the beach camp with the porn mags and the Egyptian Temple with the torches, just to the right of Hippieville, where, to his endless disappointment, there was absolutely no hash -- or any mind-altering substance at all, for that matter -- to be had.
Not that anyone would know it, given the mindfuck he’s witnessing just now; he thinks he’d be more comfortable with the Cave of Wonders yawning in front of him, if he could blame it on a bad trip.
“I’m thinking Time Vortex, what do you reckon?” The Master asks, as if he expects Adam to have any sort of genuine opinion. Opinions, he’d learned early on, were usually a waste of time.
“Time Vortex?”
“Heart of a TARDIS,” the Master answers, like it’s common knowledge, eyes wide and lips bowed. “Kills and creates,” he adds with wonder as he looks the opening up and down, seems to move, to glow with less of the reflection of the light, and more of the light itself. “Gorgeous fucking thing,” he breathes, hands caressing the jagged planes of rock, the flow of the water breaking sharp around his knees; “right here. And these bastards don’t even know it, do they?”
Adam watches for a moment as the Master leans his head against the stone, closes his eyes and simply breathes, before he formulates an appropriate response.
“You’re mad, aren’t you?” Adam says with the kind of level certainty that only insanity can prompt, can maintain. “You’re just... mad.”
The Master turns back toward him, half lit by the golden beams, half cast in shadow: “In a manner of speaking, perhaps,” and Adam blinks; swears he can see the skeleton, the bones of the man at his side as he smiles, bleak: white lines wrapped tight with tendon under skin -- he shivers in time with the tap of those fingers, steady yet manic in common time; “but it really does make everything so much more interesting.”
__________________________
After so many lifetimes alone on this Island, Jacob’s learned to let most things go; let most things slide.
After so many lifetimes with his brother’s black-souled doppelgänger dogging his steps, Jacob’s also learned to be a little suspicious of people in general.
And just as a rule, Jacob really doesn’t like it when people touch his fucking bottle of cork-stopped malevolent-wine.
“What are you doing?” Jacob asks, stilling newly-spun thread between his fingertips as he watches the figure, sees through the dark where the Being -- not a Man -- eyes his tapestry, fingers the dangling fibers on the loom, stares hard at the lines that mean more than their ends:
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
“Just taking a peek,” comes the answer, flippant and sharp; “keep your sandals on.”
Jacob almost scowls -- refuses to give this interloper the pleasure whilst he runs his fingers across Jacob’s possessions, sullies Jacob’s things; he can only think one thought as his eyes skim the glass, the stone and sand that the Being studies, sneers down upon without comprehension or respect at carvings, at crafts and the line of carafes stuffed closed -- one thought: time obeys him, in this place, and him alone.
The shatter of the glass against rock, the slosh and spill of the deep red-black menace held inside; Jacob barely dares to blink, doesn’t move -- all things end. All things.
“Whoops,” the creature who calls himself Master, the creature who changes faces and steals worlds and crushes realities and takes, controls, condemns -- too much like Jacob, and the lost half of Jacob’s soul; the creature smirks, licks the dark stain of the liquid from his hands where they bleed, where the shards cut and ripped, mixed blood with wine and danger, mingling too fast with a beat Jacob can’t recognize, doesn’t know how to restrain.
Only the dead see the end.
__________________________
The Man, the Monster in the Black; there’s something about him that Adam doesn’t like.
“How long?” he asks, appearing from nowhere to stand, casting shadows over where Adam crouches, hands cupped in the clear water of the shoreline, drops leaking from the cracks between his fingers, falling full from his hands as he breaks his hold, cranes his neck upward to squint into the sun, the only brightness in the face of the Dark.
“Excuse me?”
The Man looks down at him, and Adam can feel the scorn, the pity. He resents it, and he wishes, more than anything, that he had the drive, the rage to care anymore -- to act and crush and burn. “How far are you from where you belong?”
Adam lets the heat of the sun burn red into his pale skin for a few moments longer before he turns back, gathers another handful of water and raises it to his chin -- dips his lips below the stagnant surface before he splashes it over his face, lets the droplets fall; he doesn’t answer.
He doesn’t know.
The sandpaper-scratch of steps on the beach churns in his stomach, just a little -- joints popping and bones creaking as another body folds, kneels next to him; as rough hands trace around the sand and pinch, cup and scoop a handful of the grains, let them fall like rain, particle by matte-gleaming particle back whence they came.
“Ashes to ashes,” and it’s mocking, and Adam’s flesh itches with the implications, sifts like dust under his fingertips. It makes his throat tight, and it stretches, aches in his skin, shivers heavy and swift in the cage of his chest, the muscle worn and too old, too taxed. It’s salt in a wound, simmers without the cleanse of the ocean in his veins -- he remembers the pieces of himself, the dissolution of his very breath as breath came shallow, then scarce, as he fell apart and blew away.
He belongs in the dust, the sand and the cinders. He belongs to the dust unto dust.
He never did believe in hell.
He thinks that maybe now, he does.
__________________________
Admittedly, he doesn’t really think it through. Consequences haven’t been deadly for him in a very long time -- weren’t, until the end, and even that was only illusory, short-lived.
It’s the incessant talking, really, the irritating nag of that voice -- that’s what pushes him over, breaks his resolve: that’s what has him taking hold of unsuspecting arms and wrestling a deathless alien into the glowing pool of an island underworld, holding him down until the struggling stops, until the end comes for the endless.
Really, considering the places he finds himself these days, he should write a fucking book.
He watches the body with a certain satisfaction, and a shallow well of remorse as it floats toward the mouth of the cavern, the cave; and he remembers suddenly, seeing that open mouth and those frozen features bathed in light, what he once saw in a rising politician who, with a shot or three in his system, he’d dared to buy a drink.
He remembers what he saw that had him naked on his knees that very same night, a slave to his Master, mouth fucked raw in ways no ordinary man could have survived.
The splutter, the cry that breaks the recollections startles him, steals him from the memories -- reminds him quick, before they fade, that it wasn’t just him with his mouth full, his throat slick and sore over the course of those endless, depraved London nights.
“Oh, you devil!” And the Master, he shouts it with the perverse sort of glee Adam can remember him dancing around an airship with, that Adam can remember in his eyes between the kinds of thrusts that left imprints, bruises in the shape of a spacecraft counsel, concentric circles that spelled names and words that bled and seared.
“Pity you’ve already forgotten the countless benefits of my respiratory bypass system,” he adds with a lecherous wink, and Adam makes the conscious effort not to look any lower, not to glance at anything further down than the deep heave of his chest under soaked clothing, thin and transparent against the skin.
He tenses when the Master’s heavy hand rests on his shoulder -- congratulatory, but laced with a threat: “Good try, though.”
__________________________
He’s lit up in stars that mean nothing, are nothing; that could -- should -- be dying, should be snuffed beneath his palm.
“I know what it feels like,” and he doesn’t startle, doesn’t shift his gaze as he catalogs systems, galaxies, worlds he’s known and world’s he’s taken, will taken, took once and left for ruin except that they flourished, they endured.
He endures.
It’s less than it should be; it’s deeper than he’s made to stand.
“To never be able to go home.”
The man beside him: curls of his hair stick close to the skin, strands of silver and soot clinging in the spray of the sea, the rise of invisible smoke, and he will never understand what anyone could see in this planet, these creatures; he will never understand.
The Master smiles, feels small -- boundless. “You have no idea.”
__________________________
He does this every morning; has done this every morning since the mornings stopped looking different, feeling new.
Sometimes, it’s buildings. Sometimes, it’s a knife. A bow. A gun. Sometimes it’s arsenic, or strychnine. Sometimes it’s fire and rage.
Here, it’s usually the water. Here, he sinks until his corpse floats on top of the surf, the foam of the morning tide.
He feels a hand -- harsh grasp that pulls him by the skin of his neck and yanks with fingertips that blossom, rupture pain and blood beneath the surface as they tug him upwards until his lungs are filled with air again instead of saltwater.
Jacob doesn’t say anything, just pulls him; Adam’s too off-balance to do much else but thrash half-heartedly as Jacob lowers him close, snaps him whiplash-quick above the surface of the sea, dangles him between release and ever-present, ever-cycling resurrection.
“Do you really want that?” Jacob hisses, like it’s a curse, like it’s a sin.
“Yes,” Adam answers, like it’s the truth, because it is.
Jacob doesn’t say anything; drops him like a leaf on the wind and lets him drift until the sun breaks the line of the horizon.
So Adam drifts.
__________________________
The practical effects of immortality have, historically, been lost on Adam -- they’re there, and they’re many, but they’re inconsequential.
Sometimes, he gets distracted. His instincts, the grace it took to fight, to inhabit armor and metal and a blade in his hand like a second skin, an extension of self -- it’s faded, distant now; he sees the leaves, cherry blossoms in his mind, branches like arrows and smiles in the sky, sometimes -- he sees blood in the colors of the soil, the clumps of the sand, and he wonders about things that will never be. He gets distracted.
He’s not the man he used to be; he’s not even the man he was before that.
So he doesn’t see sometimes where they’re walking, he doesn’t remember, sometimes, that there’s anyone there with him at all, that the steps he picks up next to him, just behind -- that they don’t belong to dainty feet, pale features, an open face.
That they may, instead, belong to a sadistic, psychotic, universally-renowned moron with a penchant of grating on Adam’s time-hardened nerves in ways that he’s never known.
In fact, he often tries actively to forget that particular fact; not that it’s proven itself worth much of the effort, for all of the good that it’s done him. The fucker’s lucky he gives head like no other, else Adam would have run him through the rest of his bizarre nine-lives within their first five minutes on this godforsaken rock.
Either way, he doesn’t see the foot that’s poised inside his stride, that catches at his ankle and sends him tumbling, catching the back of his head on a particularly treacherous outcropping, sending blood into the water until the gold stains amber, until the clear clouds over and he drops under the currents, the subtle little waves.
He sees, wet with distortion and what’s left of the ripples of impact; he sees a shock of blond and a flash of white, and then nothing.
It’s disgusting, how familiar the sensation really is.
He comes to in the middle of spluttering, his arms ahead of his brain as he propels himself back to the surface, to the exaggerated ‘Awww’ of juvenile disappointment that reaches his ears as soon as he gasps in thick, humid air; as soon as he shakes enough drenched hair from his line of sight to see the twisted grin waiting for him on that bastard’s face.
“I can’t die, you idiot!” he yells in the face of that smirking leer; and whatever that man’s a Master of, it’s absolutely nothing worth keeping.
“You can hardly blame me for trying!” And there’s a sparkle, a crazed sort of gleam in those eyes as Adam paws at the pebbles, the damp dirt at the bank.
He’s pretty sure he could find someone else who could suck him off satisfactorily, if he looked hard enough. Worst case scenario, he goes back to his own right hand.
__________________________
It’s strange, how they can stand with rusted clubs on rutted ground, swinging and noting marks, holes -- how they can play a goddamned game of golf without either of them knowing so much as the other’s name.
The dimpled white orbs flying through the air, soaring; like severed heads and futures cut short, paradoxes and pretty voices from the End of the Universe itself. He can remember the screams -- theirs, his own as the Chameleon Arch took hold of him, reduced and condensed him into something less, something human. He can hear the whistle, the whisper of their words: Mister Master, like the wind as he walks, as he swings, as he plays at an existence beyond the penance he will serve.
He misses the shot as his opponent sinks it true, and it shoots through him, irrational, unbound: it’s a rage he thought he’d lost, thought he’d let fly one last time and could then let go of; a rage that had killed him, but had died with him, too.
The lightning gathers, builds in his palms; strikes for an instant, illuminates the body, the flesh of his victim in fluorescence until there’s nothing where the Man in Black had once stood -- nothing but smoke and crackling static.
He feels something drop within him, something swell and burst and grow -- it dies quick, though, when the cloud of smoke sparks hard and fast, sends a chill through him before it swoops forward and dissipates in an instant, leaving the terrible, twisted features of the Man more than a Man before him, staring wrathful down upon him: angry god.
“Shocked,” he chuckles darkly, and the Master almost deigns to tremble as his better -- for the round -- his foe walks away, swaggers toward the hole and retrieves the ball before tossing it into the air and evaporating, the cloud of Him skittering off above the trees before gravity stakes its claim and the ball falls back to Earth.
__________________________
They meet beneath a tree, outside the charred remains of a cabin; they meet outside of time, beneath a tree.
“So,” Adam starts, his back against the bark, the scent of burning still in the air, though the ground beneath him is cool; “it seems we stand at an impasse.”
The Master bends at the waist, falls gracelessly, deliberately to the dirt and scatters a puff of debris about them with the impact of his weight. “We always did do hate sex rather well.”
“Mmm,” and Adam lets the rough texture of the tree dig hard into his scalp as he leans his head back and closes his eyes, breathes in a world he left behind for the traces of it, the echoes of it in the here and now. “I think I’ll need to be a bit less sober for that.”
He feels the breath on his neck, at his ear; it’s cool enough to feign a shiver, but he doesn’t need the excuse. “That Jacob character’s got a stash of vile looking wine,” the Master murmurs, hot and low, and Adam can’t help the way his lips curl, can’t help the way his groin tightens -- can’t help sense memory, or the hand upon his thigh.
His eyes snap open as he processes the suggestion for more than just the promise, the lilt of satisfaction searing in his gut. “Are you suggesting we fuck in his strange and mysterious foot?” he asks, eyes narrowed, because that’s just wrong, even for them. Even for here.
“Well, unless you want to get sand everywhere,” the Master shrugs, stands, and they always were a bit wrong, really; more than just a bit.
“Point,” Adam concedes, letting the hand held out to him fold into his own, uses the leverage to propel himself to his feet. “Lead on.”
__________________________
“So.”
Jacob looks up into the face of his brother, sees the way his lower lip is caught between his teeth, the way his eyes are crinkled at the centers instead of the sides: a tell that has nothing to do with the game spread out between them.
“So,” Jacob repeats, a little leading, a little haughty -- there’s only one place this conversation can go. He takes his turn, throws his sticks.
“About...” and his brother swallows, watches too close when Jacob moves his pawns too far, too soon; tosses again and stops cold. He looks up once his markers are in play.
“Yes?”
They catch each other’s eyes for the longest space that either of them has ever forgotten to breathe; they can hear, if they try, the shuffle-and-moan of the cretins who’ve infiltrated their Island home, and Jacob thinks again on how hard it might be to trick the buffoons onto the submarine, with the coordinates set straight for Tunisia. Or Siberia.
His brother breaks the eye contact first, studying too many of Jacob’s pieces near The House of Re-Aton, before tossing two blanks; he moves, scowls, speaks his piece:
“I stand corrected.”
Jacob smiles, and takes the game.