Work Text:
The Reverend Daughter of Drearburh is a wretched, sickly whelp of a girl. Perhaps she was better off in her cavern of a castle, knitting femurs to patellas and patellas to tibias. At least there she may have had a corpse of a library and a few sets of bone husks to totter around. Here in the Mithraeum she simply stumbles and babbles and rots, and Ianthe doubts that there would ever be anyone to mourn her.
Augustine speaks of her the way one speaks of a half-blind runt. He sews together a story of a pale and squabbling blunder, barely able to hold her head up long enough to vomit up blood and halfway to death's door first thing out of the womb. He's right, for the most part.
"Frankly I think euthanasia would be the most humane course," he hums absently, studying the trail of blood sliding limply down his rapier. Sharp florescent lights turn his post–duel skin an abnormal oatmeal, naked without the sheen of sweat. Ianthe mimics his posture (rod-straight and apathetic all at once) and smothers the breaths pushing traitorously against her ribs.
The Saint of Patience is a callous bog of a man; gray and short in the face of ineptitude (the irony of his name is not lost on her). Ianthe might appreciate him much more if he wasn't such a consistent thorn in her side. In between her dissident arm and chronically shifting eyes, Augustine seems in a trapped in a state between pride at nabbing the good baby lyctor and irritation at the possibility that there may be something sour with this one as well.
(Harrow—her sweet, baby leper—has done a remarkable job of working his nerve today. A babbling of something that even she had only partly understood left long trails of blood streaking from her ears, staining the corners of her jaw a dark carmine. Ianthe had been the one to wipe the blood from her cheeks, dragging her off to bed in her post-hemorrhage nonsense. The curve of her nose, her coal-black lashes. Sweet supple lips stained with spatters with blood, and Ianthe thinks mildly that it is such a lovely sight.)
"It's revolting," Augustine mutters baldly, sliding an eggshell white cloth down the length of his rapier. (An absent gaze studying the keen razor point, and Ianthe might say he almost looked wistful if she thought he carried a scrap of regard for Harry.) "And moderately depressing. A bit like watching a pup vomit up its intestines."
"Oh, I don't know," Ianthe sighs. Shifting her rapier from the right limb to the left, she idly runs her finger along the blade until she feels the familiar rupture of a break in the skin. "I've grown particularly fond of her."
Augustine snorts. "God, that's the problem."
Fishing in his pocket, the Saint of Patience lights up the end of a cigarette, and thin fingers of smoke slither wickedly above his head. Ianthe's mind wanders absently to scenes of martyrs and their pyres.
"You and John think there's some sort of charm in letting your mangled dog hobble around a while." With a cigarette pinned between two fingers, Augustine grins with too many teeth, and it would even be playful if his eyes didn't remain stubbornly flat and callous. "See how well that works out, hm?"
And even in lyctorhood, the Saint of Patience is a bitter and heretical old man that Ianthe can't bring herself to mind when he speaks this way. So while he drones on she studies her finger and the waxy, unbroken skin that insists it has never met a rapier, and she is silently whipped with a thin slice of resentment. She's begun to miss the brutality of the flesh.