NEW CHAPTER!
Title: Song in Red & Gray-Chapter 37: Invisible
Author: ophelivia
Rating: R-NC17
Word Count: 1700ish
Pairing: Beckett/OC
Characters: Mercer, Rose, Cutler, James mentioned
Summary: "Do just what I tell you and no one will get hurt." A series of vignettes spanning both films.
Status: In-Progress
Disclaimer: I don't own the Pirates characters. Rose is mine, but I should mention that she began in an RPG over on fanfiction.net. This story has nothing to do with the plot of that game. The prompts for each chapter are from 50_smutlets.
Warnings: Power plays, S&M, emotional manipulation, prostitution and implied slash. The chapters will go in no real order. I'm picking the prompts at random. Here: MECKET...no like A LOT of Meckett. And a dash of Speckett too actually. LONG CHAPTER
Okay it has taken me FOREVER but with this hella hella complicated semester drawing to a close I have finally gotten around to posting a new chapter! Man it feels so good to be back. I've really been in a creative downer lately. Anyway, I'm actually really proud of this chapter because this is the one that breaks all the rules. I've written everything here that I said would never make it into this fic. I'm also really excited about how much of a response I got to my last chapter, you guys are the best! I'd especially like to thank life_of_amsu because this chapter is a long time coming and I never would've gotten the idea without her awesome fics!
Earlier chapters: here
2-39: Invisible
It was hard, almost torturous to do it this way. Walking practically at the quarry’s heels. Fighting every impulse to hide. This betrayed every instinct. This was not a hunt and this creature wasn’t worth the effort, useless off the sea. Couldn’t even watch his own back. Nevertheless it had to be. He had to track the Admiral. The Admiral would lead him to the thing. Then he’d find out what he already knew.
In the old days his instinct would have been enough. Maybe even unnecessary. But Lord Beckett’s own senses were no good now. Bewitched by the prey Mercer should have been chasing. The joints in his arm still weren’t right. This would have to do.
His tracking ground was the sordid end of the island, past buildings hunched like old men’s shoulders. Broken windows, doorframes and people inside them.
The Admiral did not belong here.
He attempted disguise, shirtsleeves and tricorn. Clearly he had been on his way to the thing when David had made himself known. Now the two were weaving designs of elaborate desperation in the district’s dirt roads. This was what David wanted. For nights he had engaged in this ridiculous dance, dogging the dog, telling him I know. Then, as the fool began to understand, he’d disappear. Only the Admiral’s imagination. David could use real guile; play on the pet’s stupidity as he led him back to the smarter of the two.
Even now the very thought of it enflamed him. David had no doubt the redheaded succubus was the one to plan it all. Reeling the Admiral in with diaphanous threads of sex and guilt. Guilt over her precious Andrew. James Norrington owed that wild creature, and she was going to get her due even if she had to drag them both down. David admired that certainly. But he knew that she would fail. He knew she would. He remembered.
∞
There had been no Lord Cutler Beckett at that time. There had been only Young Master. Fair haired, fair eyed, near invisible in thin silver skin. Just a feverish face hidden by thick curtains and satin pillows.
The servants knew better than to question what was happening to the desperate master’s only son. It was more than their jobs were worth. But Mercer had only ever felt vague disgust when he thought about the dying child, more a white ferret than a person. If the little thing couldn’t survive in the word, well that was not Mercer’s problem.
Then came that night just before the boy turned thirteen. Torrid, storm ready heat. Mercer returned to find the spindle legged youngster in the middle of his room, hands clenched and shaking behind his back. The older man raised an eyebrow.
“Master Cutler?”
“Mister Mercer.”
The boy struggled for monotone. He had a querulous voice on the edge of manhood. One day it would freeze the veins of courtier and whore alike. Then it just made David smile.
“There is a professional matter I wish to discuss.”
Mercer smiled. Stepped forward close. Shadow spreading entirely over the child’s plague-ravaged body.
“You,” the clerk whispered, “slunk past your nurses, your parents, all those in charge of you, found your way through the dark and broke into my rooms without anyone’s permission?”
Cutler gulped eyes wide and blue moon bright. Tried to draw himself up, succeeding only in tripping.
“Sir.” The boy began a speech now that was clearly long rehearsed. “You have worked in service of my father and his father before him. One day…One day you will work for me. I merely wish to…expedite the value of your services.”
David leaned down.
“And how is that?”
At first, Mercer thought the boy’s words a joke. But looking closer, he saw something else. A flame struck deep inside, like a lamp placed in an alabaster tomb.
In this young child, whom no one thought would live out the year, Mercer saw the mark of a killer.
“Don’t deny it,” demanded the quavering treble. “I know more than you think I do. I know more than everybody thinks I do.”
The silver cherub leaned close to David’s pock marked mess of a face.
“You get people who try to hurt my father. Well these people are hurting me. They’re killing me.”
He looked full up. His voice lost its shake.
“I want you to destroy them.”
∞
The shadows were a welcome embrace to an older, different David now. It had been some time since he’d come to the thing’s splintering rooms. Back when it was a game. When the slut was just another kind of victim. If your prey could give you everything how much was left to take?
∞
David wondered even now if it had been a game. The boy grew stronger each day, as if thriving on the death itself. Mercer broke the silence and told his master about the physicians, assuring the old man things had been taken care of (and getting a fine fat raise in the process.) But he couldn’t remember when the son became part of his dreams.
The boy was a born huntsman, and for the first time David felt he had found a spirit to match his own. Brought back from the brink of death the child was a predator, sinking teeth into the world, hanging ever on. The flame Mercer had seen steadily grew into an icy blaze. The burning conviction to never again be victimized. And to that end, a great, almost hateful mistrust of men. If his short life had been believed worth less than personal gain, why was any life worth more? The boy studied endlessly in business and war. Worshiped strategy. Conquest. The evaluation of strength and weakness. The never-ending human fray for power. One day he dreamed of using his father’s position to gain some of his own. But a future leader was bound to make enemies, and had to feel neither fear nor concern when dispatching them.
Mercer began to instruct Cutler in the craft of taking life.
He taught the boy how to pick the best knives, where the most prominent veins were located. He showed him the beauty of blood against a wall. The way it felt to experience the life flooding slowly from your victim.
“Take your time,” he always told him. “Savor it. Celebrate your control.”
∞
Now time at last. They hadn’t thought he’d seen them. The panicked sea horse grabbing her arm, racing through the midnight darkness. Shaking her shoulders. Whispering:
“I’ve got to see you. Something’s happened. Mercer-”
David felt a surge of pride at the way the thing paled at his name.
“Mercer what?”
Norrington gulped.
“Tomorrow. Find me tomorrow.”
Like a coward he ran. In the dark David watched it run its hands in its hair and swear against his name.
∞
Master Cutler had a difficult time of it at first. The poison in his blood would leave him forever something of the child he was then. And while he showed some prowess with a blade and a great love of shooting from the back of a horse, his physicality kept traditional methods like David’s slightly out of reach.
“I’ll never be as strong as you,” he complained sadly.
The older man took cupped one leathery finger beneath a pearlized chin.
“In the jungles of New Spain,” he said. “There is an enormous beautiful flower that gives off the scent of rotted meat in order to attract flies and reveal its animal nature. A female praying mantis will bite off her mate’s head even as his body still copulates. Every creature on earth changes and develops for survival’s sake, master. Do the same. Use what you have been given, do not fight against it.”
The boy’s eyes ignited once more, maybe brighter than ever. It was at this time he turned to another great love: the classics. He poured endlessly over the ancient philosophies, plays and legends. Here he began to find his way. He began to learn seduction. He asked David to help him set traps. In hindsight Mercer realized that this was where the diversion began.
The two watched from the underbrush, still and silent til the sun was high. The first lesson: be patient.
Suddenly a badger hobbled up amidst the leaves. Lesson two, Cutler noted, one never knows when the right victim will appear.
They’d slathered a slice of fruit in honey as bait. The woven snake of a snare invisible on the ground. Lesson three: always sweeten your offers. Lesson four: conceal your intentions until the last possible moment.
“You see?” Mercer breathed beside him. “One wrong step and…”
The rope made a fantastic hissing sound as it caught the creature’s leg and strung it high. Master Cutler’s triumphant cry melded perfectly with the first in a series of loud yelps of terror from the animal.
“Congratulations,” said Mercer. “And now for the final phase.”
The clerk unsheathed a small knife in one hand and grabbed the struggling badger with the other when suddenly the boy protested:
“Wait, you must not!”
David looked to him.
“And why not?”
“Because…You know what will happen. Then it will be…gone. Over.”
He stared bemusedly. Cutler was having a hard time forming the words, but he knew he wanted the badger to live. Just for a little while. He liked watching it, the sound it made. He stirred at the option of letting it go or stabbing it through. He didn’t want that thrill to end.
“Eventually even a trapped thing must be disposed, master.”
The boy looked at him.
“Why?” he asked.
∞
The thing was cruel in its fury. Through the keyhole Mercer saw one of the Admiral’s proud shoulders bend. A murmured apology. And the thing’s snarl in response. Mercer saw its narrow hands, speckled in cinders. Darting through the air like blades or birds. And on the inside of its wrist, pulsing veins as it gesticulated and trembled. It was unnecessary to hear the words. They argued, they doubted, they attempted to scheme; and towards morning the Admiral left. After he was gone Mercer returned to the keyhole. The thing sat on the bed with its head pressed in its knees. Then it stood, picked up a crooked brass candle and dashed it to the floor.
David had hoped they would fuck. But it was all right. Now to the difficult stage.
Tracking the thing would be much harder thanks to the…indiscretion. Thinking of it even now made David’s jaw clench. How could he have been so stupid? Caving in to desire. Under the bitch’s spell just like his boy.
Now it knew his ways, and with the Admiral’s warning she’d be looking to every shadow. David comforted himself however. The purpose in this hunt (and indeed it was that) was the same. A warning. I know. Then let the lovers suffer. What could she do? Go to the master?
It did not do that of course. It did something else.
∞
For the first time in his wretched life, David Mercer knew exactly what he wanted. As he dropped the last victim’s bloodstained handkerchief into his charge’s hand, he knew he had to take it. Caught beautifully between child and man, Master Cutler looked up at him with all the trust and gratitude of the angels in his eyes. Mercer got down on his knees.
“It will be all right now,” he said. “You’re safe.”
The boy looked away, nodded tightly. Something glittered in his eyes.
∞
Mercer was beginning to see, perhaps for the first time, the change his master had wrought over his pet. He remembered tracking at the beginning, and a few scattered times in between when he’d just wanted to look at her…He remembered her steady eyed, confident step. The way she twisted her practiced body to avoid being pushed by the crowd. How passerby called out her name and she fired back with greeting or good natured insult. The way she knew the streets, was at home in the muck. Like him.
But now…now it merely ran almost blind. It kept its eyes low and tripped over its feet. It was pushed and pummeled and seemed almost to fade away. It went straight out and straight home.
And this the thing that came so alive as he listened in the night. Who sighed and screamed and fought and submitted. It only came alive in the hands of its master.
Perhaps they were more alike now than ever.
∞
The boy did not stray from his dark guardian now, and became a better student than ever. Yet Mercer found that the more time they spent together, the more a dissonant chorus inside him rose up screaming:
Do it, do it! He must learn…Do it.
He dreamt of him at night, his little angel. So many times he entered the bedroom in stealth, merely to watch Cutler’s face turn gold beneath the light of a candle in David’s shaking fist. Then the boy would twitch or sigh in fitful dream and Mercer would bolt back to his own dark hole; on the bed, stroking himself with trembling hands that could so easily choke the breath from any man.
It was not enough.
∞
Four steps behind. Four steps between David and the nighttime desert of the pale freckled back. The ever so fragile curve of the spinal column, shoulders, limber swinging arms. In the slow motion world of David’s mission even the tendril of hair against her neck swung like a pendulum. Mercer kept his eyes glued to it.
This was going on too long, he knew. He tracked its movements ever so much longer than the Admiral. Every night promised to be the end, but David simply couldn’t. He was ensnared. Pulled toward the thing. Pulled toward her.
He only wanted a closer look.
∞
Snares had become Cutler’s weapon of choice and he’d taken to fashioning them himself. It was what he was doing on that silver, rainy afternoon as Mercer sat sharpening one of his knives. Outwardly, he was calm, ordinary. Not so inside. No.
“Master Cutler,” he began slowly. “I think we ought to have a talk you and I. Man to man.”
The boy turned. The movement was protracted. That was how Mercer knew it had begun.
“Yes, Mister Mercer?”
The older man slid his tongue over his upper lip.
“In business,” he began; trying to adopt the tone of a man far more learned than he himself was, “everything is based on favor. If you give someone something then it is implicit that they give you what you need when you ask them. That’s so, isn’t it?”
The boy nodded, only a little hesitant. It was strange, trying so hard to use words a child might have understood when what David would propose was that most adult act. But as he let his eyes wander over the mystery body, meeting the cherub’s sparkling blue gaze he knew he was ready...
“I have done what you asked of me, Master Cutler,” said Mercer. “There is something I should like in return.
He approached the boy slowly, more out of his own fear than anything else. He cautioned himself. He was not hunting. He knelt down. The boy would not take off like a startled rabbit.
“I have more I should like to teach you.” His voice became a whisper. “Much more.”
“A lesson!” Cutler was delighted. “Shall I get my tools?”
“No,” he replied softly. “You need nothing more than what you already have.”
∞
It had started to run.
David’s shoes made a bloody sound against the gravel. No time for silence now. He had forgotten somewhere in the preceding minutes why he made this stupid pursuit. He knew dimly that he wasn’t meant to catch the thing, but the sight of her pushing through the emptying midnight streets with her heart pounding sent him mad. He could hear the frantic life, smell the rage and terror on her. It was beginning again. He’d give in to temptation again if this kept up. There was no making him listen.
He couldn’t follow her when she finally ran inside her building, but David knew there to be a ladder on the outside. It was crumbling, dangerous. He liked it. Nimble as a lizard he avoided the rotted rungs. He was close. What would he do?
And he collided with its eyes.
Waiting for him outside its door. Unarmed but for glittering eyes and rigid back. The thing and the hunter regarded each other. The world remained slow for only a moment more, the tendrils of hair against her face more paralyzing to him than the snakes of Medusa.
She said nothing. Didn’t scream, didn’t even breathe. Just stared at him. Pure, hot, palpable hatred. She knew how weak he truly was. She knew he would do nothing. She knew she was human.
Bile and horror swelled up in David’s throat. It gripped his every nerve. Hurriedly, desperately averting his eyes from her, he scrambled down the ladder and fled.
∞
“Cutler? Cutler m’boy where are you?”
Man and child turned with animal speed toward the echoing voice from downstairs, then looked back at each other. Master Cutler got quietly up, and left the room. When his father embraced him at the bottom of the stairs, Cutler saw exactly the same look in the older man’s eyes as in Mercer’s. He understood in that moment how love weakened a person, what damage it could do. He began to work against it, and against any other thing that moved him to so much emotion as to impair.
The rainy day was never mentioned by either of them. Lessons with Mister Mercer grew few. Then, when Cutler was seventeen he found a new teacher. Black eyes, wise magical hands, a lulling voice accented with every single language. Beautiful. He taught Cutler many, many things; things Mercer could only have dreamt of.
That did not end well.
But when the storm had passed, who was there in the shadows four steps behind? Mercer watched the man his boy became with bursting pride. Ruthless. Efficient. A man of power not just in his family name but in his own actions. He became a far greater hunter in the end.
David knew he could do anything.
∞
The very next night, the woman was called to the house.
David had not seen her enter, but coming in from the stables found the house pervaded with the scent of her, the electrical current that struck waves in the air only when she was about. For an instant David panicked. She would tell Lord Beckett.
Then he saw the way she’d looked at him, and knew she never would. He did not go up to the bedroom. He did not listen. And then at dawn, as he sat at his post in the front hall, he saw the two of them descend the stairs together. His master’s eyes glowed faintly, and his golden hair was visible. David watched her rake it smooth with her fingers.
They passed him as if he were no more than air. At the door, Lord Beckett leaned in and left the softest of kisses on his pet-whore’s neck.
David bit down upon the flesh inside his cheek. He was so very tired.
They belonged only to each other.
Author: ophelivia
Rating: R-NC17
Word Count: 1700ish
Pairing: Beckett/OC
Characters: Mercer, Rose, Cutler, James mentioned
Summary: "Do just what I tell you and no one will get hurt." A series of vignettes spanning both films.
Status: In-Progress
Disclaimer: I don't own the Pirates characters. Rose is mine, but I should mention that she began in an RPG over on fanfiction.net. This story has nothing to do with the plot of that game. The prompts for each chapter are from 50_smutlets.
Warnings: Power plays, S&M, emotional manipulation, prostitution and implied slash. The chapters will go in no real order. I'm picking the prompts at random. Here: MECKET...no like A LOT of Meckett. And a dash of Speckett too actually. LONG CHAPTER
Okay it has taken me FOREVER but with this hella hella complicated semester drawing to a close I have finally gotten around to posting a new chapter! Man it feels so good to be back. I've really been in a creative downer lately. Anyway, I'm actually really proud of this chapter because this is the one that breaks all the rules. I've written everything here that I said would never make it into this fic. I'm also really excited about how much of a response I got to my last chapter, you guys are the best! I'd especially like to thank life_of_amsu because this chapter is a long time coming and I never would've gotten the idea without her awesome fics!
Earlier chapters: here
2-39: Invisible
It was hard, almost torturous to do it this way. Walking practically at the quarry’s heels. Fighting every impulse to hide. This betrayed every instinct. This was not a hunt and this creature wasn’t worth the effort, useless off the sea. Couldn’t even watch his own back. Nevertheless it had to be. He had to track the Admiral. The Admiral would lead him to the thing. Then he’d find out what he already knew.
In the old days his instinct would have been enough. Maybe even unnecessary. But Lord Beckett’s own senses were no good now. Bewitched by the prey Mercer should have been chasing. The joints in his arm still weren’t right. This would have to do.
His tracking ground was the sordid end of the island, past buildings hunched like old men’s shoulders. Broken windows, doorframes and people inside them.
The Admiral did not belong here.
He attempted disguise, shirtsleeves and tricorn. Clearly he had been on his way to the thing when David had made himself known. Now the two were weaving designs of elaborate desperation in the district’s dirt roads. This was what David wanted. For nights he had engaged in this ridiculous dance, dogging the dog, telling him I know. Then, as the fool began to understand, he’d disappear. Only the Admiral’s imagination. David could use real guile; play on the pet’s stupidity as he led him back to the smarter of the two.
Even now the very thought of it enflamed him. David had no doubt the redheaded succubus was the one to plan it all. Reeling the Admiral in with diaphanous threads of sex and guilt. Guilt over her precious Andrew. James Norrington owed that wild creature, and she was going to get her due even if she had to drag them both down. David admired that certainly. But he knew that she would fail. He knew she would. He remembered.
∞
There had been no Lord Cutler Beckett at that time. There had been only Young Master. Fair haired, fair eyed, near invisible in thin silver skin. Just a feverish face hidden by thick curtains and satin pillows.
The servants knew better than to question what was happening to the desperate master’s only son. It was more than their jobs were worth. But Mercer had only ever felt vague disgust when he thought about the dying child, more a white ferret than a person. If the little thing couldn’t survive in the word, well that was not Mercer’s problem.
Then came that night just before the boy turned thirteen. Torrid, storm ready heat. Mercer returned to find the spindle legged youngster in the middle of his room, hands clenched and shaking behind his back. The older man raised an eyebrow.
“Master Cutler?”
“Mister Mercer.”
The boy struggled for monotone. He had a querulous voice on the edge of manhood. One day it would freeze the veins of courtier and whore alike. Then it just made David smile.
“There is a professional matter I wish to discuss.”
Mercer smiled. Stepped forward close. Shadow spreading entirely over the child’s plague-ravaged body.
“You,” the clerk whispered, “slunk past your nurses, your parents, all those in charge of you, found your way through the dark and broke into my rooms without anyone’s permission?”
Cutler gulped eyes wide and blue moon bright. Tried to draw himself up, succeeding only in tripping.
“Sir.” The boy began a speech now that was clearly long rehearsed. “You have worked in service of my father and his father before him. One day…One day you will work for me. I merely wish to…expedite the value of your services.”
David leaned down.
“And how is that?”
At first, Mercer thought the boy’s words a joke. But looking closer, he saw something else. A flame struck deep inside, like a lamp placed in an alabaster tomb.
In this young child, whom no one thought would live out the year, Mercer saw the mark of a killer.
“Don’t deny it,” demanded the quavering treble. “I know more than you think I do. I know more than everybody thinks I do.”
The silver cherub leaned close to David’s pock marked mess of a face.
“You get people who try to hurt my father. Well these people are hurting me. They’re killing me.”
He looked full up. His voice lost its shake.
“I want you to destroy them.”
∞
The shadows were a welcome embrace to an older, different David now. It had been some time since he’d come to the thing’s splintering rooms. Back when it was a game. When the slut was just another kind of victim. If your prey could give you everything how much was left to take?
∞
David wondered even now if it had been a game. The boy grew stronger each day, as if thriving on the death itself. Mercer broke the silence and told his master about the physicians, assuring the old man things had been taken care of (and getting a fine fat raise in the process.) But he couldn’t remember when the son became part of his dreams.
The boy was a born huntsman, and for the first time David felt he had found a spirit to match his own. Brought back from the brink of death the child was a predator, sinking teeth into the world, hanging ever on. The flame Mercer had seen steadily grew into an icy blaze. The burning conviction to never again be victimized. And to that end, a great, almost hateful mistrust of men. If his short life had been believed worth less than personal gain, why was any life worth more? The boy studied endlessly in business and war. Worshiped strategy. Conquest. The evaluation of strength and weakness. The never-ending human fray for power. One day he dreamed of using his father’s position to gain some of his own. But a future leader was bound to make enemies, and had to feel neither fear nor concern when dispatching them.
Mercer began to instruct Cutler in the craft of taking life.
He taught the boy how to pick the best knives, where the most prominent veins were located. He showed him the beauty of blood against a wall. The way it felt to experience the life flooding slowly from your victim.
“Take your time,” he always told him. “Savor it. Celebrate your control.”
∞
Now time at last. They hadn’t thought he’d seen them. The panicked sea horse grabbing her arm, racing through the midnight darkness. Shaking her shoulders. Whispering:
“I’ve got to see you. Something’s happened. Mercer-”
David felt a surge of pride at the way the thing paled at his name.
“Mercer what?”
Norrington gulped.
“Tomorrow. Find me tomorrow.”
Like a coward he ran. In the dark David watched it run its hands in its hair and swear against his name.
∞
Master Cutler had a difficult time of it at first. The poison in his blood would leave him forever something of the child he was then. And while he showed some prowess with a blade and a great love of shooting from the back of a horse, his physicality kept traditional methods like David’s slightly out of reach.
“I’ll never be as strong as you,” he complained sadly.
The older man took cupped one leathery finger beneath a pearlized chin.
“In the jungles of New Spain,” he said. “There is an enormous beautiful flower that gives off the scent of rotted meat in order to attract flies and reveal its animal nature. A female praying mantis will bite off her mate’s head even as his body still copulates. Every creature on earth changes and develops for survival’s sake, master. Do the same. Use what you have been given, do not fight against it.”
The boy’s eyes ignited once more, maybe brighter than ever. It was at this time he turned to another great love: the classics. He poured endlessly over the ancient philosophies, plays and legends. Here he began to find his way. He began to learn seduction. He asked David to help him set traps. In hindsight Mercer realized that this was where the diversion began.
The two watched from the underbrush, still and silent til the sun was high. The first lesson: be patient.
Suddenly a badger hobbled up amidst the leaves. Lesson two, Cutler noted, one never knows when the right victim will appear.
They’d slathered a slice of fruit in honey as bait. The woven snake of a snare invisible on the ground. Lesson three: always sweeten your offers. Lesson four: conceal your intentions until the last possible moment.
“You see?” Mercer breathed beside him. “One wrong step and…”
The rope made a fantastic hissing sound as it caught the creature’s leg and strung it high. Master Cutler’s triumphant cry melded perfectly with the first in a series of loud yelps of terror from the animal.
“Congratulations,” said Mercer. “And now for the final phase.”
The clerk unsheathed a small knife in one hand and grabbed the struggling badger with the other when suddenly the boy protested:
“Wait, you must not!”
David looked to him.
“And why not?”
“Because…You know what will happen. Then it will be…gone. Over.”
He stared bemusedly. Cutler was having a hard time forming the words, but he knew he wanted the badger to live. Just for a little while. He liked watching it, the sound it made. He stirred at the option of letting it go or stabbing it through. He didn’t want that thrill to end.
“Eventually even a trapped thing must be disposed, master.”
The boy looked at him.
“Why?” he asked.
∞
The thing was cruel in its fury. Through the keyhole Mercer saw one of the Admiral’s proud shoulders bend. A murmured apology. And the thing’s snarl in response. Mercer saw its narrow hands, speckled in cinders. Darting through the air like blades or birds. And on the inside of its wrist, pulsing veins as it gesticulated and trembled. It was unnecessary to hear the words. They argued, they doubted, they attempted to scheme; and towards morning the Admiral left. After he was gone Mercer returned to the keyhole. The thing sat on the bed with its head pressed in its knees. Then it stood, picked up a crooked brass candle and dashed it to the floor.
David had hoped they would fuck. But it was all right. Now to the difficult stage.
Tracking the thing would be much harder thanks to the…indiscretion. Thinking of it even now made David’s jaw clench. How could he have been so stupid? Caving in to desire. Under the bitch’s spell just like his boy.
Now it knew his ways, and with the Admiral’s warning she’d be looking to every shadow. David comforted himself however. The purpose in this hunt (and indeed it was that) was the same. A warning. I know. Then let the lovers suffer. What could she do? Go to the master?
It did not do that of course. It did something else.
∞
For the first time in his wretched life, David Mercer knew exactly what he wanted. As he dropped the last victim’s bloodstained handkerchief into his charge’s hand, he knew he had to take it. Caught beautifully between child and man, Master Cutler looked up at him with all the trust and gratitude of the angels in his eyes. Mercer got down on his knees.
“It will be all right now,” he said. “You’re safe.”
The boy looked away, nodded tightly. Something glittered in his eyes.
∞
Mercer was beginning to see, perhaps for the first time, the change his master had wrought over his pet. He remembered tracking at the beginning, and a few scattered times in between when he’d just wanted to look at her…He remembered her steady eyed, confident step. The way she twisted her practiced body to avoid being pushed by the crowd. How passerby called out her name and she fired back with greeting or good natured insult. The way she knew the streets, was at home in the muck. Like him.
But now…now it merely ran almost blind. It kept its eyes low and tripped over its feet. It was pushed and pummeled and seemed almost to fade away. It went straight out and straight home.
And this the thing that came so alive as he listened in the night. Who sighed and screamed and fought and submitted. It only came alive in the hands of its master.
Perhaps they were more alike now than ever.
∞
The boy did not stray from his dark guardian now, and became a better student than ever. Yet Mercer found that the more time they spent together, the more a dissonant chorus inside him rose up screaming:
Do it, do it! He must learn…Do it.
He dreamt of him at night, his little angel. So many times he entered the bedroom in stealth, merely to watch Cutler’s face turn gold beneath the light of a candle in David’s shaking fist. Then the boy would twitch or sigh in fitful dream and Mercer would bolt back to his own dark hole; on the bed, stroking himself with trembling hands that could so easily choke the breath from any man.
It was not enough.
∞
Four steps behind. Four steps between David and the nighttime desert of the pale freckled back. The ever so fragile curve of the spinal column, shoulders, limber swinging arms. In the slow motion world of David’s mission even the tendril of hair against her neck swung like a pendulum. Mercer kept his eyes glued to it.
This was going on too long, he knew. He tracked its movements ever so much longer than the Admiral. Every night promised to be the end, but David simply couldn’t. He was ensnared. Pulled toward the thing. Pulled toward her.
He only wanted a closer look.
∞
Snares had become Cutler’s weapon of choice and he’d taken to fashioning them himself. It was what he was doing on that silver, rainy afternoon as Mercer sat sharpening one of his knives. Outwardly, he was calm, ordinary. Not so inside. No.
“Master Cutler,” he began slowly. “I think we ought to have a talk you and I. Man to man.”
The boy turned. The movement was protracted. That was how Mercer knew it had begun.
“Yes, Mister Mercer?”
The older man slid his tongue over his upper lip.
“In business,” he began; trying to adopt the tone of a man far more learned than he himself was, “everything is based on favor. If you give someone something then it is implicit that they give you what you need when you ask them. That’s so, isn’t it?”
The boy nodded, only a little hesitant. It was strange, trying so hard to use words a child might have understood when what David would propose was that most adult act. But as he let his eyes wander over the mystery body, meeting the cherub’s sparkling blue gaze he knew he was ready...
“I have done what you asked of me, Master Cutler,” said Mercer. “There is something I should like in return.
He approached the boy slowly, more out of his own fear than anything else. He cautioned himself. He was not hunting. He knelt down. The boy would not take off like a startled rabbit.
“I have more I should like to teach you.” His voice became a whisper. “Much more.”
“A lesson!” Cutler was delighted. “Shall I get my tools?”
“No,” he replied softly. “You need nothing more than what you already have.”
∞
It had started to run.
David’s shoes made a bloody sound against the gravel. No time for silence now. He had forgotten somewhere in the preceding minutes why he made this stupid pursuit. He knew dimly that he wasn’t meant to catch the thing, but the sight of her pushing through the emptying midnight streets with her heart pounding sent him mad. He could hear the frantic life, smell the rage and terror on her. It was beginning again. He’d give in to temptation again if this kept up. There was no making him listen.
He couldn’t follow her when she finally ran inside her building, but David knew there to be a ladder on the outside. It was crumbling, dangerous. He liked it. Nimble as a lizard he avoided the rotted rungs. He was close. What would he do?
And he collided with its eyes.
Waiting for him outside its door. Unarmed but for glittering eyes and rigid back. The thing and the hunter regarded each other. The world remained slow for only a moment more, the tendrils of hair against her face more paralyzing to him than the snakes of Medusa.
She said nothing. Didn’t scream, didn’t even breathe. Just stared at him. Pure, hot, palpable hatred. She knew how weak he truly was. She knew he would do nothing. She knew she was human.
Bile and horror swelled up in David’s throat. It gripped his every nerve. Hurriedly, desperately averting his eyes from her, he scrambled down the ladder and fled.
∞
“Cutler? Cutler m’boy where are you?”
Man and child turned with animal speed toward the echoing voice from downstairs, then looked back at each other. Master Cutler got quietly up, and left the room. When his father embraced him at the bottom of the stairs, Cutler saw exactly the same look in the older man’s eyes as in Mercer’s. He understood in that moment how love weakened a person, what damage it could do. He began to work against it, and against any other thing that moved him to so much emotion as to impair.
The rainy day was never mentioned by either of them. Lessons with Mister Mercer grew few. Then, when Cutler was seventeen he found a new teacher. Black eyes, wise magical hands, a lulling voice accented with every single language. Beautiful. He taught Cutler many, many things; things Mercer could only have dreamt of.
That did not end well.
But when the storm had passed, who was there in the shadows four steps behind? Mercer watched the man his boy became with bursting pride. Ruthless. Efficient. A man of power not just in his family name but in his own actions. He became a far greater hunter in the end.
David knew he could do anything.
∞
The very next night, the woman was called to the house.
David had not seen her enter, but coming in from the stables found the house pervaded with the scent of her, the electrical current that struck waves in the air only when she was about. For an instant David panicked. She would tell Lord Beckett.
Then he saw the way she’d looked at him, and knew she never would. He did not go up to the bedroom. He did not listen. And then at dawn, as he sat at his post in the front hall, he saw the two of them descend the stairs together. His master’s eyes glowed faintly, and his golden hair was visible. David watched her rake it smooth with her fingers.
They passed him as if he were no more than air. At the door, Lord Beckett leaned in and left the softest of kisses on his pet-whore’s neck.
David bit down upon the flesh inside his cheek. He was so very tired.
They belonged only to each other.