Work Text:
It was a slim, looming building hewn from stonework in Tevene style, though its awnings—newer decor over Imperial bones—curled toward the streets like the fingers of an eavesdropper, giving a glimpse of characteristic Trevisan ceramic. The windows were a casement style, too small to sneak through despite the glut of trim and arcade-work worthy of climbing on to reach them. He probably thought it made him immune to unwanted visitors; typical. Lucanis elected to take the stairs. The climb was solitary, dimly-lit, with a familiar stink of mildew and dust. Voices chattered beyond closed doors, playing out in their own little worlds, ignorant to the visitor passing by outside. The layers of landings and spiralling steps brought him ever higher, some stairs creaking when he met a wooden one amidst the original stone. He repeated the apartment number on the back of his tongue and became aware—again—of the contract pressed up against his chest.
Forty-one. The number was carved into the limestone transom. He tried the knob, expecting little. Locked. As he went to pull away, inertia swept over him; Spite grasped hold of the door handle and rattled it, snapping some part of its metal innards, making the knob hang loose. With its latch broken, the door felt free to move. The apartment was more pleasant in its interior than the stairwell had been. The stink of damp and old was overtaken by spice, a dinner long-since eaten, a Tevene cologne that elicited in Lucanis memories (both pleasant and poor) of Minrathous, of friends he had made, and of the magisters whose robes stank the same way. The small casement window Lucanis had spied from the exterior was in the kitchen, where it illuminated the place in a fast-fading red haze.
The smell made it all too real. He stagnated in the entryway, reaching for his blade. He made the mistake of looking down at himself, saw the costume he wore, and watched the dying sunlight play across leather and steel; he averted his eyes in a grimace. He knew the name on the contract and yet he donned his usual armour, scurried to it as he always had. His hand still played on the pommel of his dagger, refusing to grip it properly.
Lucanis knew from the earliest outset that this would happen. More than his hesitance, more than the looming dread he felt rising, the denial that fought to meet it, the insistence that he could do this—be this—he knew that it was all a formality. From the moment he found himself away from home, free from the Ossuary and in that surreal place with an undying sun, amidst all that pain and fear; from the very second a hand had felt his flesh and knew him as Lucanis, he knew this is what it would come to. Nothing could be more important than his work; not the stack of letters he kept hidden under his mattress, not the name penned on the last line, not his idle daydreams of their next meeting. Caterina had made that clear.
Maybe she was being purposefully ignorant, printing that name on the contract, believing Lucanis would rush out to fulfill it only to blanch when he saw the body at the end of his blade. Had she thought he wouldn't recognize it? Were it anyone else, it might have been a fair assumption. Did it matter? He had come all this way, hadn't he? His body had been moulded to obey; it didn't know how to do anything else. But his body resisted even without knowing what that entailed. It leaned away, tarrying at the sight of hearthfire in the next room, fleeing from the moment now that it had found him, just as he had fled from every reminder of that long-awaited consequence in the months he'd been home.
It was a formality, he was certain. Caterina had grown tired of his procrastination; he would obey or he would die. That was all.
Spite piloted his feet forward, rushing to that end, blind to Lucanis's turmoil, simply excited by a familiar smell. He brushed past stacks of paperwork on every furniture surface; books left strewn about; a jacket lumped on the sofa; sets of fine shoes clustered near the entrance. A potted plant that was nearly his height bobbed at him when he passed. Hearthlight lured him to the central room of the place. From his approach at the mouth of the hallway, Lucanis could see a propped-up leg and a limp arm hanging from a settee. With slow, careful steps, Lucanis walked its perimeter until he could see his target in his entirety.
Lucanis thought of his bedroom back at the Villa: the wide-open granite fireplace, the marble tile on the floors, the starched-straight linens. The chest of keepsakes he had hidden under his bed the moment Caterina welcomed him back into their family home. The chaise he had pushed up into a corner, crowded with a dressing screen, topped with a too-soft pillow and a thin sheet in the hopes of recreating the only sanctuary he had ever known. Caterina had never seen the Lighthouse pantry; there was no way she could tell what he was trying (in vain) to revive, like he was a boy making a fort in the storage room again, hiding away with contraband something-like-love letters (reading them, re-reading them, re-re-reading them) as his pilfered candy. Discomfort chased the length of his spine: those vulnerable little secrets would be exposed soon enough. Caterina would finally know, without an ounce of doubt, that he had changed beyond her reckoning; that he had learned to want for more.
Frustration loomed large. He should've been able to do as he was told. She had welcomed him back into the family home after everything: his disappearance; the loss of her second-to-last grandson; the besmirching of Lucanis's body by that abomination—to have accepted him as he was (alive, barely coping) had been a kindness far beyond her usual, and how had he repaid her? With failure. Now, he was going to lose the only family he had left, and for what? For some outsider; for someone who would surely glimpse of him—the version of him Caterina knew—and be sent away out of repulsion? He would be alone, and it would be a fate of his own making, because he was turning his back on the only person who had no choice but to tolerate him.
In the anger and the shame, he managed to unsheathe the blade. He bared it to the glimmering firelight. Something resisted still. Was it Spite, or a demon of his own making—that desperate and gnawing thing he curtailed with every tight-tailored appearance, every resentful argument left unsaid? This was all a formality, this showing of effort. Lucanis toiled over his own insufficiency, scalded himself on guilt, agonized that he could never be what Caterina had laid out for him (she had made it so simple—had tailored him specifically for this eventuality, and he'd still managed to fuck it all up—) even though he had known, beneath layers and layers of denial and self-loathing, that this was the inevitable conclusion. Nothing—no-one—could ever come before loyalty to the First Talon… even now that the mantle fell to him. Caterina was doing what was best for him—what he did not have the strength to do for himself—because things would get too complicated otherwise.
He couldn't face it, even knowing there would be no other conclusion. For months, he had found every excuse to shirk his duties as First, avoiding her confrontation, running from his reflection, shying away from even the implication that he was not the man he used to be (or that the man never existed at all). He had moulted, and was trying to pass off that dead shell as living flesh. She wasn't an idiot; she had seen through him from the start. Yet another reason he was unfit to be her successor. He knelt to the floor, creeping closer to those propped-up legs. He gripped the settee's armrest, watched its upholstery dimple under the pressure of his gloved fingers, regarded that sleeping form with supplication. How long had Octavian even been in Treviso? A dozen scenarios played out in Lucanis's mind at rapid-speed: he was a liar, a spy (for whom?), here to get Lucanis vulnerable just to stick a knife in his back; Caterina gave him the contract so he might finally see the truth and cast aside this misdirected loyalty—
That body—his contract—twisted to get comfortable against the settee's rigid back. Octavian always had trouble sleeping. As Lucanis crawled closer, near enough to smell the cologne on his clothes, he picked up a hint of pipe smoke; Octavian must've taken up the habit again in their time apart. A book lay open on his lap, forgotten in his slumber. Lucanis squeezed his blade in one hand; with the other, he withdrew the book and placed it aside.
The urge to reach out and touch him washed over him in a riptide. Lucanis squeezed his eyes shut against the resounding ache to follow. He had known from the first brush of fingers against his skin, the tracing of scabbed-over wounds and gnarled tissue, the encircling of moles and scrape over raised veins, that this was something he would fail for. Caterina would've rather seen him broken, forever changed by the blood on his hands, because at least then he would be back under her control, primed for remoulding. If this—this temptation of touch, of being realized—was worth more than her, his family, and all she had ever given him… he should not bother returning to the Villa at all. Traitors were not welcome. At least Illario had done everything in search of power for their family. What was Lucanis's excuse? How pathetic was he, that he would abandon them the moment someone showed him affection? He was a terrible grandson.
His blade clattered on the floor. Lucanis slumped forward, forehead pressing into the meat of a leg. He endured his throat's twisting. His fingers itched to re-equip his knife and try again, to pull back on that ill-fitting robe of maternal approval and pretend it still could swallow him whole. He knew more of the world now than he did when that approval was enough to keep him content.
Fingers trailed from the crown of his head to the nape of his neck, drawing over his hair, scrubbing his scalp, massaging the tension crowding his skull. Lucanis repressed an instinctual flinch and took the moment to recover his composure.
"If I knew you'd find out where I live, I would've set up traps." said Octavian. "Make you work for a living." A meek little grumble escaped when his fingers fled to rub at his eyes. When Lucanis gave no response, he ran his hands over his hair another time, stewing in the prolonged silence until worry urged him to speak. "It's been a while." When his hand found Lucanis's cheek, that cheek pressed back into it with dire vehemence. His next quip tangled in his throat. His thumb grazed a wet streak of skin, then the wrinkle of a grimace; Octavian's voice fell lower, a string of reassurances ushering Lucanis from his knees and into the seat with him.
Lucanis pressed his face into a bare neck, his body finding places to settle wherever room was made, the leather of his armour squeaking and squeezing incongruously; one of his hands moved blindly—urgently—to open the fastenings and peel back his collar. Then, with a single, ruddied eye trained on the movement, Lucanis snatched one of Octavian's hands by the wrist and forced it past the folds of material to splay against his collarbone. At last, he relaxed.
Air still came with difficulty. He turned each hyperventilated gasp toward the skin where he hid himself, swallowing bitterness, working through a knotted throat. Self-loathing still dogged him. What was he, that he could capitulate in this self-made conundrum then believe himself worthy of pity? He grew aware of the legs beneath him, their crowded position, the awkwardness and discomfort of his uniform. This was not how their reunion was supposed to go.
The copacetic contact with his chest made tears burn in the back of his throat. He squeezed his eyes shut against their onslaught, fooling himself into believing that they were unnoticeable—that his trembling inhales weren't obvious—and did his best to suck down a breath and hold it until his head began to swim. Arms tightened around him, squeaking on the material of his armour, attempting to quiet his struggling breaths. Each inhale, once it came, tasted like hope.