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He lost. He failed. He got spat out by something bigger with teeth marks in his bones and now he has to limp away for help. That’s all Marc can think as he sits there, his story ending with a bitter taste in his mouth as his ribs ooze sluggishly between his fingers.
Clea listens, looking at him like he isn’t just some wounded animal clawing at her doorstep, and does exactly what he came here for.
Help.
The Midnight Sons… A summoning spell that makes his eyes sting just as much as his knuckles do…
Marc grimaces as he shifts in his seat, the rest of what Clea says after the brand is summoned blurring together.
He can feel each pulse of blood pumping through his ears, the adrenaline still making everything feel numb but beginning to thin enough that he hurts. More than he can reasonably ignore.
‘Marc…'
His body lurches forward, a groan passing his lips.
Steven’s presence slides forward like it’s stretching against latex, squeezing against Marc’s awareness until he can only barely feel the tips of his fingers.
No. No he’s not ready. He needs more time.
His eyes roll and things spin enough that he feels nauseous.
‘If we don’t take a moment to breathe,’ Steven says, voice so firm that Marc feels like he’s being chided, ‘then that thing is going to kill us. Or I will…’
Marc tightens his hand, trying to push his brain back into the front seat.
This isn’t your job, he thinks. This won’t get it dead.
There’s the impression of a laugh, Steven’s face sneering in his periphery, before another dip of dizziness forces Marc’s eyes shut. The next thing he knows, he’s blinking up at the ceiling of a different room with Clea floating by his bedside.
“Ah. Back to the world of the waking I see.”
Marc squints as she dips down, eyes running over him for a moment before she leans away.
“The others will be here soon. My spells are aiding them but there is only so quickly souls can be plucked from one place to another. You have a bit of time to rest.”
Marc grunts as he pushes himself up, looking down to see the side of his suit ripped open further and the skin on his abdomen sealed shut. Not stitches. Magic. He can feel the tingle of it in his muscles.
“That other man of yours has quite the talking he wants to give you,” Clea says offhandedly as she moves to one of the large shelves lining the new room.
Marc scowls. “Yeah…” he mutters, slipping off the medical bed. “I know…”
Even now he can feel Steven watching him. Jake, too, though his presence is less clear. There’s still anger, plenty of it, but also a cocktail of exhaustion and worry that swirls around Marc’s skull like old seawater; smoothing out old thoughts and dredging up new ones like…
Like…
“It was a death scream of a child of my kind that brought me to this world.”
Child.
Juvenile.
Something that should not be touched.
Another surge of nausea, sourness stinging his teeth. Marc swallows and stumbles forward slightly.
“Clea…” he breathes. His mind feels like gravel grinding against itself, his glove wet when he grabs her arm.
Her eyes fall to him, glinting with worry and… a note of distaste at the new stain smearing onto her sleeve.
“Yes, Marc?” she prompts. “You shouldn’t be in pain, if that’s what you’re wondering.” She plucks his hand off her arm and settles to stand before him. “I know my work is thorough.”
“No, it’s…” Marc grits his teeth, brows furrowing.
How does he say this?
He’s been careful about discussing the Mission at large with any members of the supernatural elite. It already has an unsavory reputation in Strange’s eyes. Marc’s… relationship with it would no doubt raise even more alarms.
But… Clea is a friend. Clea is not Strange.
Marc swallows.
“I need a translator.”
***
“You always know how to take the route less travelled, Marc.”
Clea grins as she finishes the spread of her items, her legs crossed mid air in the center of his office and several artifacts floating in her orbit. Marc knows several of them—a piece of the original Mission’s foundation, a scrap of one of his shredded capes from when the House spat him out over a year ago, and a vial of his own blood. The rest are things from Clea’s library. A compass with sigils that point to nowhere, a collection of candles burning with black flame, and a shredded mass of splintered wood, dotted with age and floating around her head like a crown.
“I believe we are ready to begin,” she says.
Marc sits, awkwardly, his side still tight where the wound has been closed and his skin clammy with sweat. He swallows.
“Great House of Shadows,” Clea addresses to the room, “visitor from the beyond, devourer of men… your lover wishes to speak to you in mortal tongue.” Her eyes sharpen slightly, her hands working the shape of a spell beneath her chest. The objects around her whirr, shimmering as the walls around them groan.
“Use my throat for your words, beast,” Clea continues. “Follow this open path and take my voice, but do not overstay your welcome.”
She stretches the spell in her hands until it forms a web, sticking each of the objects together and spreading out to the ceiling and floor. When the tendrils connect with the House itself, Clea stiffens, her hands locking into the glowing mass of threads and her eyes darkening.
A moment passes.
Then another.
Then… Clea’s head tips down towards Marc, those eyes a void where there used to be light, and he knows.
“Mission,” he says.
“My Human,” it responds.
The voice is not singularly Clea’s. Her mouth moves, her jaw works, but the sound that comes out is deep and breathless, a dragging of air through her lungs that seems alien to the being now controlling it.
Marc feels a surge of something warm come over him all the same. His hands clench against the arms of the chair at the name given to him, taken aback by finally getting to hear his home speak plainly.
“Is that how you think of me?” he asks.
“Yes,” the House responds. “All of you. You are mine in many ways and in many forms. Though it is not the only title you have earned.”
The walls shift slightly closer.
“My human,” the House repeats. “My savior. My heart.”
Jake slips out around Marc’s mouth with a smile, and for a moment, his hand lifts towards the ceiling as if to caress it.
Marc quickly tightens his fist, smoothing his expression back to neutrality.
“I have something to ask you, Mission,” he says.
“Yes, so it seems.” Clea’s head cocks to the side. “It is something that worries you. Something we cannot pass so easily between us. You would not ask this woman for her aid otherwise. What troubles you, my human?”
Marc shifts again, an old discomfort crawling up his spine. “The other house, the one spreading through the city. It calls itself The Mansion Ravenous. It came here for you.”
The room groans, Clea’s lip twisting in distaste as an echo of the House’s own emotion.
“Yes,” the House says again, and this time, the words are laced with vitriol. “It speaks to me on the winds. It eats this place for my sake and waits for me to join it. But I have not asked it to. I have not asked for this incursion.”
Clea’s face shifts again, an unnatural ripple of tension, before her eyes lock onto Marc.
“It is vengeance,” the House says simply. “Like yours, without direction.”
Marc scowls at the comparison, but tries not to let his own anger distract him.
“That’s not what I wanted to talk about,” he says. His tongue works for a moment before he sighs, adjusting in his chair.
“The Mansion called you a child, Mission. A juvenile of its kind. I’ve seen what it can do, what it is capable of, and I believe its age far surpasses your own. But that would mean that you… that we have been…”
The walls still, then chitter, an eerie shudder of laughter rising from Clea’s lips.
“How sweet is my beloved,” the House croons. “How soft he is in fear.”
The floor curls up around Marc’s legs, winding around his calves and rubbing against the muscle.
“Tell me, dear heart,” Clea’s face morphs into a smirk. “Are the mountains children when laid against the stars? Do you humans turn to infants when you stand before your gods?”
That floor winds higher, curling over Marc’s knees in liquid pools of wood polish.
“I am young for my kind, yes,” the House admits. “But you are nothing when compared to us all.
Marc sighs, muted relief twisting under his sternum. But something uneasy still lingers, the sense of wrongness imprinted on him from before casting his thoughts now into doubt.
“Then what you are to me…” he murmurs. His fists clench, and a fluid hand rises skeletal from the darkness to curl around his knuckles. “…what we have done—”
“—is communion of common bodies,” the House finishes. “Two insignificants, finding life in each other's skin.”
Marc exhales shakily, and the walls squeeze closer, Clea’s body floating in a bulb of light as the imprint of room washes away into a wave of darkness.
Cloth scratches against Marc’s cheek, then the cool kiss of tile and a brush of bone. Immaterial touches graze against his body from all directions, affection seeping into him with no words uttered to give it shape. Shared presence. That is all they have ever really needed to know one another.
“If I am child to my ilk…” the House says slowly, its use of Clea’s voice quieted to something tender, “then you are no more than a mayfly. Small and fleeting as you flutter around our insides.”
Marc huffs, the blur behind his eyes growing as the other two reach forward to feel those same words. He allows them into his hands, into his cheeks, Jake’s warmth and Steven’s steadiness blooming in his periphery.
“I guess it’s lucky we’re a pretty nice bug then, huh?” Jake says, voice rough with an emotion Marc didn’t know they were carrying.
The space around them tightens with near laughter again, Clea’s face smoothed out with a soft smile where the web keeps her steady.
“A specimen all my own,” the House replies, and Marc smiles.
He watches as their hand curls up once more, this time interlacing with the shadows, their glove forming into the negative space where long fingers squeeze around them.
“We… care for you, Mission,” Marc says. He swallows around the words that feel too heavy, too real, and takes an unsteady breath. “My Mission,” he murmurs instead. “My home.”
A surge of wind blusters around them, smelling like paint and dust and old paper, before the dark begins to reshape itself into walls again.
Marc returns to his seat, a shadowed hand still wrapped up in his grip, and watches as the spell around Clea begins to dim.
“My humans,” the House says finally. “In mortal tongue… what a heart you have made in me.”
And with that, the walls stiffen, the web in Clea’s hands dripping away between her fingers until it has dissipated entirely. Her eyes clear, a breath surging back into her lungs as she wavers in mid air, before she seems to steady herself.
“Marc…” she whispers, a weightiness underlying her voice.
She settles slowly back to the floor, her hand waving to clear the collected objects with a small flash of light. She glances up to the ceiling, then to the side, brows tight but not angry.
“So much in these realms we still have yet to understand…” she mutters to herself, before turning her gaze back to him.
“The others are nearly here,” she says. “We must be ready.”
“Yeah…”
Marc lifts the shadowed hand to his lips and presses a kiss to it, before moving to stand. The limb dissipates, the room humming for a moment before it settles back to its normal state.
“The Mansion took the rest of us… the rest of the people I love. It’s not going to keep them, and it’s not going to take anyone else. Mission?”
The air groans in recognition.
“Get a room ready for our incoming guests. We have a demolition to plan.”