Pre-nuptial Agreements, and other forms of sacrifice
.
This is a prequel, I guess, to a longer thing that Puel and I are going to be working on. The tentative series title is All Stars are Bound by Gravity, mostly because we've been calling it Suikoden All-Stars for short. And it's going to be a big post-III epic Nash thing with plot and rune theory and romance and awkward reunions out the wazoo.
But first, this has to happen.
Title: Pre-nuptial Agreements, and other forms of sacrifice (AO3 version here)
Author: Mithrigil
Fandom: Suikogaiden
Characters: Nash, Sierra.
Words: 1800
Rating: PG-ish R. A vampire wedding complete with turning, tasteless jokes, and poorly tuned organs.
Don’t know the fandom? You might still like this if you enjoy: Snarky couples, nonhuman definitions of love, gender-role play, desecrating churches, rebirth.
Summary: Nash and Sierra’s wedding night. In another faith’s church. With a corpse.
Pre-nuptial Agreements, and other forms of sacrifice
They don’t play organs at weddings in Harmonia. The crystal doesn’t take very well to the sound. Glass harmonicas, now, those make a Harmonian wedding, filling the silence with the barest twinges of perfectly tuned sound, fragile and ephemeral as the instrument itself, while everyone looks on silently at the theocratically-ordained property transfer. Or at least that’s how the First Class citizens do it.
This wedding, though, requires an organ, and Sierra doesn’t play it very well. One would think, with eight hundred years of experience at least, she’d have picked up a processional or two, but no, she’s terrible, and the instrument is several years out of tune.
“We should have held a rehearsal,” Nash says, because there’s only so far listening politely can go, even if he’s about to prepare himself for an eternity of it as far as Sierra goes.
“We should have gotten a priest,” she snaps, not looking up from the keyboards. She stomps down on one of the footpedals and a shudder runs through the entire chapel. “You’re the one who insisted on music.”
“It’s not a wedding without music.”
“It’s not a wedding without a bride in a white dress either, and I don’t see you wearing a white dress.”
“You could take yours off. I’ll wear it.” He’s entirely serious, whether he sounds it or not, and he knows she knows. “I could be the prettiest bride you’d ever ask for.”
She harrumphs, and leaves the song on the organ unfinished. That’s probably for the best. She turns around to face Nash and the cushion beneath her squeaks against the skin of her thighs, and Nash’s cheeks color and heat.
He wonders if he’ll ever blush again, after this.
“I’ve had prettier,” she says, stalking toward him, her feet almost soundless on the floorboards of the church.
“I’m sure you have, in your many years.”
“Prettier,” she goes on, “and smarter, and better behaved.” Her teeth glance past her lips. Muscle memory kicks up in Nash’s neck and he swears his veins are already responding to her, pushing closer to the surface, more willing than the rest of him is.
To think, he’s getting cold feet at the altar. He almost says that aloud.
Nash has carried Sierra for miles, up roads and through forests and down from fractured rooftops, and as much as he’s complained about it she never took up more space than her due. She does now. Corpses are heavy as a rule, but Sierra has wrists as skinny as a spindle and still she weighs him down, brings him to his knees with nothing more than a touch of his shoulder. The Moon Rune glows under her skin, chills the hand against Nash’s cheek.
“You still want this, don’t you,” she doesn’t quite ask. Her tone is as cold as her skin.
Nash reaches across his chest, covers her hand with his own, stifles the light. “You might have forgotten over the centuries, but it’s what we do for the women we love.”
“Die?” She smiles, drums her fingertips on his temple. “Invite corruption?”
“Make sacrifices,” he says. “Something completely alien to you, I’m sure.”
He’s wrong, and they both know it, but at least it puts a smile on her face. And that’s what this is about, after all, at least for him.
“I don’t give this lightly,” she says, around that bright, fanged smile.
He smiles -- not back, but down, into the curve of her palm. By now the light of the Rune is bright enough to sear his eyes. He closes them, and afterimages of stained glass swarm behind the lids, new arteries of rust between the colored panels. “I hate to remind you, but I know that intimately. You must be getting forgetful in your old age.”
Even with his eyes closed, he knows, sees, her mouth poised just a breath from his neck. He knows her quick pink tongue, her cracked pale lips, the barely-discernible beat that runs through them. She scrapes her incisors against his jaw, as much to prepare as to tease, and he feels it as both.
“You’re an idiot,” she purrs. It’s as much an endearment as she’s ever given.
He laughs, and it pulses his flesh against her teeth. “Is that any way to talk to your future wife?”
“If you insist on marrying me in the sight of his Holiness and the Circle Rune, do it now.”
“Without a priest? In a Toranese church?”
“You can tell your boss later. I’m sure he’ll be glad.”
“Yes, actually.” He breathes, the dust and the light thick on the walls of his throat. “I take you, Sierra, and offer myself; what was mine is now ours.” He’d dreamed, once, of saying these words to a nice enough girl from a good enough house as his family looked on and the walls rang with crystal. That road ended in fire and sulfur. This one began in blood and will probably end in the same, a river as much as a road. “Let us be as one in the eyes of his Holiness, and in our own.”
“So be it,” she says.
“Your turn.”
She laughs, and he knows he’ll never get as much out of her. “Hikusaak can go hang himself. You’re mine now.”
He opens his mouth to laugh, and her teeth cut off the sound when they bore into his throat. One moment of silence, and then a scream wells up, so distant and echoing that it can’t be his, and Nash thinks, dimly, hurriedly, that even the walls of the church are out of tune.
She’s taken his blood before. It hurt then, and it hurts now, and even the suckling pressure of her tongue can’t mitigate the absence and the rush. He blacked out, then. He doesn’t now. His heart stutters and struggles, as fast as it’s ever beaten, like a bowstring rippling with tension before it’s let go. Her hand leaves his cheek, anchors in his hair and tilts him back, as if his head could float clean away if she didn’t hold it down. It might. It’s light enough. Everything’s light enough. Everything’s light.
Dying, it seems, is a process, and one Nash can’t completely appreciate. The spray of blood on an altar cloth for a religion he doesn’t espouse -- Sierra’s tiny hands tearing his scarf, peeling away the collar of his shirt -- a million shards of glass, but no smoke, not this time -- cold tile beneath bare shoulders -- a steadiness and stiffness in his limbs even through the chaos and wet of her body atop his, a certain compassion even as she wrings him dry. He could laugh if his muscles weren’t hers now, if they didn’t belong to her and the Moon Rune and its caprice. Caprice, Nash thinks, and the thought echoes, as if his mind’s been drained with his blood.
Sierra never makes anything easy, but easy and pleasurable have never been the same. And this is pleasurable, under the sheen of chill and pain, like the first step onto a foot that’s fallen asleep. Outside himself, as if stalled on the ceiling of the church with the frescoes of magic and heroes and stars, he sees his body suspended over the floor, high enough that even his loose hair doesn’t touch the dust. Sierra isn’t lifting him. He wonders if she could. She stands over him, her dress soaked with his blood, already dry in the light of the Rune. She isn’t smiling, and Nash did this to make her smile, it’s why, it’s everything, he needs to touch her cheek and mold it and kiss his blood off her lips until she does, and can’t. Can’t reach. Can’t move. Dead, and hers in dying, and done.
He’d still laugh about it if he could.
His life doesn’t flash before his eyes, probably because it isn’t over.
“I guess this is the only way to shut you up,” Sierra sighs. She pats down her dress -- her hands come away red -- and pouts at him. Threads of shadow line her face. She’s usually too young for wrinkles. He ought to tease her about that. He can’t speak. “I should probably leave you like this. Quiet at last.”
He’d give her some retort about who else would carry her luggage or hold the carriage reins or front the cost of the inn, but, well.
She leans down to his cheek, cold and still on the air. She kisses him. He feels nothing, not even the pressure. “It wants you too, you know. I wouldn’t be able to do this if it didn’t. It hates to see you dead.”
I must be too pretty to die, Nash thinks, or thinks he thinks.
His veins are empty. His heart is still.
“Can’t be helped,” Sierra says, and then moonlight fills everything.
***
He comes to, with his teeth buried in flesh. Either his eyes aren’t open or everything is the same fervid red, and the taste in his mouth is the same -- not just the blood he’s grown accustomed to from scrapes and wounds in life but headier, like the difference between salted meat and fresh steak. He drinks without being told to. The pulse is so much faster than his own, dances under his lips, stings his molars.
“Go as fast as you want,” Sierra says, and Nash may be addled and starving right now but he knows sarcasm when he hears it. He slows down, takes it in gulps. She snickers, and her fingertips brush the nape of his neck. Her skin feels warmer now. His must be freezing. “If you’re careful, this might be the last you have to drink for a while.”
He clings to the corpse, someone else’s, not his, and tries not to think about whether he or she or this is more appropriate. It’s surprisingly easy. Either that, or philosophical quandaries on the subject of personhood are more than he can swallow at the moment.
He suckles even after the flow of blood stops. He realizes that he doesn’t have to breathe.
Her fingertips wind into his hair, and he turns so that they tighten.
“Good morning, husband dear,” she whispers, almost purely affectionate, and he opens his eyes.
Morning, indeed. The windows of the church are filled with light, brazen and warm and, somehow, abhorrent. Sierra’s the most beautiful thing here -- one of the most beautiful things Nash has ever seen. He’ll never tell her.
He holds her, and kisses her, as strongly as he’s able, which isn’t that strong just yet. “And here I thought I was the bride. Isn’t the bride supposed to bleed on the wedding night?”
“Idiot,” she says.
There. That’s the smile he died for. A shame his kiss hides it, but, hell, there’s plenty of time to goad her into another.
***
.
This is a prequel, I guess, to a longer thing that Puel and I are going to be working on. The tentative series title is All Stars are Bound by Gravity, mostly because we've been calling it Suikoden All-Stars for short. And it's going to be a big post-III epic Nash thing with plot and rune theory and romance and awkward reunions out the wazoo.
But first, this has to happen.
Title: Pre-nuptial Agreements, and other forms of sacrifice (AO3 version here)
Author: Mithrigil
Fandom: Suikogaiden
Characters: Nash, Sierra.
Words: 1800
Rating: PG-ish R. A vampire wedding complete with turning, tasteless jokes, and poorly tuned organs.
Don’t know the fandom? You might still like this if you enjoy: Snarky couples, nonhuman definitions of love, gender-role play, desecrating churches, rebirth.
Summary: Nash and Sierra’s wedding night. In another faith’s church. With a corpse.
Pre-nuptial Agreements, and other forms of sacrifice
They don’t play organs at weddings in Harmonia. The crystal doesn’t take very well to the sound. Glass harmonicas, now, those make a Harmonian wedding, filling the silence with the barest twinges of perfectly tuned sound, fragile and ephemeral as the instrument itself, while everyone looks on silently at the theocratically-ordained property transfer. Or at least that’s how the First Class citizens do it.
This wedding, though, requires an organ, and Sierra doesn’t play it very well. One would think, with eight hundred years of experience at least, she’d have picked up a processional or two, but no, she’s terrible, and the instrument is several years out of tune.
“We should have held a rehearsal,” Nash says, because there’s only so far listening politely can go, even if he’s about to prepare himself for an eternity of it as far as Sierra goes.
“We should have gotten a priest,” she snaps, not looking up from the keyboards. She stomps down on one of the footpedals and a shudder runs through the entire chapel. “You’re the one who insisted on music.”
“It’s not a wedding without music.”
“It’s not a wedding without a bride in a white dress either, and I don’t see you wearing a white dress.”
“You could take yours off. I’ll wear it.” He’s entirely serious, whether he sounds it or not, and he knows she knows. “I could be the prettiest bride you’d ever ask for.”
She harrumphs, and leaves the song on the organ unfinished. That’s probably for the best. She turns around to face Nash and the cushion beneath her squeaks against the skin of her thighs, and Nash’s cheeks color and heat.
He wonders if he’ll ever blush again, after this.
“I’ve had prettier,” she says, stalking toward him, her feet almost soundless on the floorboards of the church.
“I’m sure you have, in your many years.”
“Prettier,” she goes on, “and smarter, and better behaved.” Her teeth glance past her lips. Muscle memory kicks up in Nash’s neck and he swears his veins are already responding to her, pushing closer to the surface, more willing than the rest of him is.
To think, he’s getting cold feet at the altar. He almost says that aloud.
Nash has carried Sierra for miles, up roads and through forests and down from fractured rooftops, and as much as he’s complained about it she never took up more space than her due. She does now. Corpses are heavy as a rule, but Sierra has wrists as skinny as a spindle and still she weighs him down, brings him to his knees with nothing more than a touch of his shoulder. The Moon Rune glows under her skin, chills the hand against Nash’s cheek.
“You still want this, don’t you,” she doesn’t quite ask. Her tone is as cold as her skin.
Nash reaches across his chest, covers her hand with his own, stifles the light. “You might have forgotten over the centuries, but it’s what we do for the women we love.”
“Die?” She smiles, drums her fingertips on his temple. “Invite corruption?”
“Make sacrifices,” he says. “Something completely alien to you, I’m sure.”
He’s wrong, and they both know it, but at least it puts a smile on her face. And that’s what this is about, after all, at least for him.
“I don’t give this lightly,” she says, around that bright, fanged smile.
He smiles -- not back, but down, into the curve of her palm. By now the light of the Rune is bright enough to sear his eyes. He closes them, and afterimages of stained glass swarm behind the lids, new arteries of rust between the colored panels. “I hate to remind you, but I know that intimately. You must be getting forgetful in your old age.”
Even with his eyes closed, he knows, sees, her mouth poised just a breath from his neck. He knows her quick pink tongue, her cracked pale lips, the barely-discernible beat that runs through them. She scrapes her incisors against his jaw, as much to prepare as to tease, and he feels it as both.
“You’re an idiot,” she purrs. It’s as much an endearment as she’s ever given.
He laughs, and it pulses his flesh against her teeth. “Is that any way to talk to your future wife?”
“If you insist on marrying me in the sight of his Holiness and the Circle Rune, do it now.”
“Without a priest? In a Toranese church?”
“You can tell your boss later. I’m sure he’ll be glad.”
“Yes, actually.” He breathes, the dust and the light thick on the walls of his throat. “I take you, Sierra, and offer myself; what was mine is now ours.” He’d dreamed, once, of saying these words to a nice enough girl from a good enough house as his family looked on and the walls rang with crystal. That road ended in fire and sulfur. This one began in blood and will probably end in the same, a river as much as a road. “Let us be as one in the eyes of his Holiness, and in our own.”
“So be it,” she says.
“Your turn.”
She laughs, and he knows he’ll never get as much out of her. “Hikusaak can go hang himself. You’re mine now.”
He opens his mouth to laugh, and her teeth cut off the sound when they bore into his throat. One moment of silence, and then a scream wells up, so distant and echoing that it can’t be his, and Nash thinks, dimly, hurriedly, that even the walls of the church are out of tune.
She’s taken his blood before. It hurt then, and it hurts now, and even the suckling pressure of her tongue can’t mitigate the absence and the rush. He blacked out, then. He doesn’t now. His heart stutters and struggles, as fast as it’s ever beaten, like a bowstring rippling with tension before it’s let go. Her hand leaves his cheek, anchors in his hair and tilts him back, as if his head could float clean away if she didn’t hold it down. It might. It’s light enough. Everything’s light enough. Everything’s light.
Dying, it seems, is a process, and one Nash can’t completely appreciate. The spray of blood on an altar cloth for a religion he doesn’t espouse -- Sierra’s tiny hands tearing his scarf, peeling away the collar of his shirt -- a million shards of glass, but no smoke, not this time -- cold tile beneath bare shoulders -- a steadiness and stiffness in his limbs even through the chaos and wet of her body atop his, a certain compassion even as she wrings him dry. He could laugh if his muscles weren’t hers now, if they didn’t belong to her and the Moon Rune and its caprice. Caprice, Nash thinks, and the thought echoes, as if his mind’s been drained with his blood.
Sierra never makes anything easy, but easy and pleasurable have never been the same. And this is pleasurable, under the sheen of chill and pain, like the first step onto a foot that’s fallen asleep. Outside himself, as if stalled on the ceiling of the church with the frescoes of magic and heroes and stars, he sees his body suspended over the floor, high enough that even his loose hair doesn’t touch the dust. Sierra isn’t lifting him. He wonders if she could. She stands over him, her dress soaked with his blood, already dry in the light of the Rune. She isn’t smiling, and Nash did this to make her smile, it’s why, it’s everything, he needs to touch her cheek and mold it and kiss his blood off her lips until she does, and can’t. Can’t reach. Can’t move. Dead, and hers in dying, and done.
He’d still laugh about it if he could.
His life doesn’t flash before his eyes, probably because it isn’t over.
“I guess this is the only way to shut you up,” Sierra sighs. She pats down her dress -- her hands come away red -- and pouts at him. Threads of shadow line her face. She’s usually too young for wrinkles. He ought to tease her about that. He can’t speak. “I should probably leave you like this. Quiet at last.”
He’d give her some retort about who else would carry her luggage or hold the carriage reins or front the cost of the inn, but, well.
She leans down to his cheek, cold and still on the air. She kisses him. He feels nothing, not even the pressure. “It wants you too, you know. I wouldn’t be able to do this if it didn’t. It hates to see you dead.”
I must be too pretty to die, Nash thinks, or thinks he thinks.
His veins are empty. His heart is still.
“Can’t be helped,” Sierra says, and then moonlight fills everything.
***
He comes to, with his teeth buried in flesh. Either his eyes aren’t open or everything is the same fervid red, and the taste in his mouth is the same -- not just the blood he’s grown accustomed to from scrapes and wounds in life but headier, like the difference between salted meat and fresh steak. He drinks without being told to. The pulse is so much faster than his own, dances under his lips, stings his molars.
“Go as fast as you want,” Sierra says, and Nash may be addled and starving right now but he knows sarcasm when he hears it. He slows down, takes it in gulps. She snickers, and her fingertips brush the nape of his neck. Her skin feels warmer now. His must be freezing. “If you’re careful, this might be the last you have to drink for a while.”
He clings to the corpse, someone else’s, not his, and tries not to think about whether he or she or this is more appropriate. It’s surprisingly easy. Either that, or philosophical quandaries on the subject of personhood are more than he can swallow at the moment.
He suckles even after the flow of blood stops. He realizes that he doesn’t have to breathe.
Her fingertips wind into his hair, and he turns so that they tighten.
“Good morning, husband dear,” she whispers, almost purely affectionate, and he opens his eyes.
Morning, indeed. The windows of the church are filled with light, brazen and warm and, somehow, abhorrent. Sierra’s the most beautiful thing here -- one of the most beautiful things Nash has ever seen. He’ll never tell her.
He holds her, and kisses her, as strongly as he’s able, which isn’t that strong just yet. “And here I thought I was the bride. Isn’t the bride supposed to bleed on the wedding night?”
“Idiot,” she says.
There. That’s the smile he died for. A shame his kiss hides it, but, hell, there’s plenty of time to goad her into another.
***
.