[Fic] But touch my tears with your lips, touch my world with your fingertips...
Fic request for
allfireburns , with the prompt "Pristine."
I love motels where all you have to do is check in at the front and the access to your room is just outside, so there's no trying to sneak past the other patrons when you're covered in blood and gore. The heavy coat I was wearing to hide the indecent amount of bloodstains on my person could only do so much and Pagiel was worse off than I was. The poison made her healing slow and trying to explain why the cute blonde girl I was carrying was bleeding pure silver was something I didn't feel like doing.
Mathias hovered at the edges of my vision like an agitated cat as I lifted Pagiel up off of the seat and carried her briskly towards the room. He kept muttering threats and insults in Aramaic under his breath that didn't do a world of good when the object of his spite and vitriol was already dead. For the most part, I just ignored him as I busied myself with arranging Pagiel on the bed. The maid staff would have legitimate questions about the strangely colored stains on their pristine sheets tomorrow, but we wouldn't be around by then to answer them.
There wasn't much I could do. The dragons had done the best that they could do for her, so now it was just up to her to recover the rest of the way. I tossed off the heavy coat and my leather jacket and kicked off my muddy boots, leaving me standing in a shirt that was torn to practical ribbons and caked with blood and jeans that looked much the same, and without a word, I climbed into the bed, curling myself protectively around Pagiel. Mathias, with something that might have been a sigh of reluctance, climbed into the bed on her other side, although he was careful not to press against her. If I had been paying attention, I might have noticed that he reached out to touch her hair in a comforting gesture. She just whimpered a protest that might not have had as much to do with us as it had to do with her feverish dreams.
And all I could think was how the hell did I get to be the one thing that's constant. Angels can be poisoned, demons can bleed, and an entire race of beings that have lasted since the beginning of time can be wiped out, but I stand as still as a stone, undying, unchanged, and cursed with the potential fate of being the last one standing.
It wasn't fucking fair.
~*~
The last time I felt this unbearably mortal was when I died- a real, actual death. Up until that point, my deaths had been like unconsciousness without proper REM sleep and I couldn't tell anyone whether it was a blessing or a curse that I got pulled out of it. Really, I just considered it a wake-up call. After four thousand years, I had honestly forgotten what it was like to be fragile and that was like a kick to the teeth.
If that was the kick to the teeth, this was the groinpunch. Not only was I mortal, but I could be broken in ways that I'd managed to avoid for millennium. Ceirdowyn tried in vain, Death was doomed to fail, and, compared to them, Dawson had been a pathetic little insect, but one fucking kid (not a kid- not a fucking kid) with a score to settle had managed it.
All the way back to the house, I couldn't think of anything else, still shaking with rage that it wasn't me that dealt the killing blow- like me killing him would have taken back what I'd lost. Part of me wanted to push Martha and the Doctor away when they tried to help me out of Charlie's truck, but I gave into the exhaustion and the pain and leaned on them for support, my eyes on the ground, watching the steady drip of blood hit the sidewalk and then the front step and then all the way across the floor towards the staircase and up to the bedroom. Every door we passed through played a somber version of Queen's "Who Wants to Live Forever" that sounded like a funeral dirge to me and Martha muttered, "Honestly" under her breath every time she heard it. I just laughed a little bit in a hoarse tone that sounded more like a cough as if the irony was just too perfect not to find humorous.
When the blood stained the pristine white sheets on the bed red as I climb into it, I suddenly remember Pagiel in that dingy motel room with Mathias and I curled around her and suddenly something hits me like a punch to the gut when the Doctor and Martha curled around me the same way. The Doctor's a Time Lord, even if he regenerates, he's still going to live and all the complexities of fragile mortal bodies don't apply to him. Martha... Well, Martha was still human, but she could heal. They were the constants- they could be killed, but not as easily as I could be.
I'm the fragile one now and now that I know what that felt like... I almost wish I wasn't.
Muse: Desmond Descant (Original)
Word Count: 875
allfireburns , with the prompt "Pristine."
I love motels where all you have to do is check in at the front and the access to your room is just outside, so there's no trying to sneak past the other patrons when you're covered in blood and gore. The heavy coat I was wearing to hide the indecent amount of bloodstains on my person could only do so much and Pagiel was worse off than I was. The poison made her healing slow and trying to explain why the cute blonde girl I was carrying was bleeding pure silver was something I didn't feel like doing.
Mathias hovered at the edges of my vision like an agitated cat as I lifted Pagiel up off of the seat and carried her briskly towards the room. He kept muttering threats and insults in Aramaic under his breath that didn't do a world of good when the object of his spite and vitriol was already dead. For the most part, I just ignored him as I busied myself with arranging Pagiel on the bed. The maid staff would have legitimate questions about the strangely colored stains on their pristine sheets tomorrow, but we wouldn't be around by then to answer them.
There wasn't much I could do. The dragons had done the best that they could do for her, so now it was just up to her to recover the rest of the way. I tossed off the heavy coat and my leather jacket and kicked off my muddy boots, leaving me standing in a shirt that was torn to practical ribbons and caked with blood and jeans that looked much the same, and without a word, I climbed into the bed, curling myself protectively around Pagiel. Mathias, with something that might have been a sigh of reluctance, climbed into the bed on her other side, although he was careful not to press against her. If I had been paying attention, I might have noticed that he reached out to touch her hair in a comforting gesture. She just whimpered a protest that might not have had as much to do with us as it had to do with her feverish dreams.
And all I could think was how the hell did I get to be the one thing that's constant. Angels can be poisoned, demons can bleed, and an entire race of beings that have lasted since the beginning of time can be wiped out, but I stand as still as a stone, undying, unchanged, and cursed with the potential fate of being the last one standing.
It wasn't fucking fair.
~*~
The last time I felt this unbearably mortal was when I died- a real, actual death. Up until that point, my deaths had been like unconsciousness without proper REM sleep and I couldn't tell anyone whether it was a blessing or a curse that I got pulled out of it. Really, I just considered it a wake-up call. After four thousand years, I had honestly forgotten what it was like to be fragile and that was like a kick to the teeth.
If that was the kick to the teeth, this was the groinpunch. Not only was I mortal, but I could be broken in ways that I'd managed to avoid for millennium. Ceirdowyn tried in vain, Death was doomed to fail, and, compared to them, Dawson had been a pathetic little insect, but one fucking kid (not a kid- not a fucking kid) with a score to settle had managed it.
All the way back to the house, I couldn't think of anything else, still shaking with rage that it wasn't me that dealt the killing blow- like me killing him would have taken back what I'd lost. Part of me wanted to push Martha and the Doctor away when they tried to help me out of Charlie's truck, but I gave into the exhaustion and the pain and leaned on them for support, my eyes on the ground, watching the steady drip of blood hit the sidewalk and then the front step and then all the way across the floor towards the staircase and up to the bedroom. Every door we passed through played a somber version of Queen's "Who Wants to Live Forever" that sounded like a funeral dirge to me and Martha muttered, "Honestly" under her breath every time she heard it. I just laughed a little bit in a hoarse tone that sounded more like a cough as if the irony was just too perfect not to find humorous.
When the blood stained the pristine white sheets on the bed red as I climb into it, I suddenly remember Pagiel in that dingy motel room with Mathias and I curled around her and suddenly something hits me like a punch to the gut when the Doctor and Martha curled around me the same way. The Doctor's a Time Lord, even if he regenerates, he's still going to live and all the complexities of fragile mortal bodies don't apply to him. Martha... Well, Martha was still human, but she could heal. They were the constants- they could be killed, but not as easily as I could be.
I'm the fragile one now and now that I know what that felt like... I almost wish I wasn't.
Muse: Desmond Descant (Original)
Word Count: 875