<FONT style="font-family:arial;"><font style="font-size:15px; font-weight:bold; text-transform:uppercase; line-height:17px;"><a href="http://lillith.insanejournal.com/16475.html" title="cw: blood, mutilation, images of violence, nudity, ritual magic." style="text-decoration:none;">CAN YOU FEEL ME SLIDE IN, CAN YOU HEAR YOUR BLOOD POUND?
I WILL THINK OF YOU IN PIECES, I WILL PICTURE US FOUND.</a></font><br /><font style="font-size:7px; line-height:5px;font-family:courier new;"><a href="http://lillith.insanejournal.com/" style="text-decoration:none">LILLITH</a> & <a href="http://mostello.insanejournal.com/" style="text-decoration:none">MATT</a> • 06.10 • COSTELLO/DEVEAUX HOME</font><div style="display:none;"><lj-cut></div>


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Despite the severity of the occasion, the ambiance in the room isn't as macabre as Lilly imagined it might be; by necessity, it can't be. The kitchen is well-lit, a few towels laid across the kitchen floor, a first aid kit and stock of tinctures and herbs at their side, just in case. She sits naked on the cold tile, rocked back onto her heels with her hands in her lap and long, black hair down her back. In front of her, implements for him to do the deed however he best sees fit: a small dagger with jade inlaid in the hilt, a lighter, the poker from the fireplace in the living room, and a serrated kitchen knife just for good measure. She's cold from the ground and a little nervous, but she regards the few shivers that creep up her back as a betrayal of the act of revenge this is meant to be, so she steels her nerves with a swig from a handle of vodka she keeps perched by her side. She's been careful to keep her mind guarded from him, choosing instead to speak out loud and only let him in to the perimeter, not wanting him to see or think she's afraid.

“Okay ...I'm ready.”

From the outside, the punishment may have seemed strange. Branding her skin with his name would seem like the exact thing he'd be craving, a mark of her loyalty, forever engraved on her body and her mind. But she knew it would feel like a chastisement, each and every time he saw it. That it would be a scar on the unblemished landscape of her body, and every time he saw her, imagined her—which he did several times a day, sometimes a minute—he would have to remember his mistake. He looks resigned, kneeling in front of her, sitting back on his heels, a larger, bulkier mirror of her, clothed in low-slung pajama pants and t-shirt he wore. The silence inside his head makes the ritual that much more troubling. He looks over the implements, picks them up and tests each one in his hand, and it reminds him of other times before when they sat in front of one another, preparing for a ritual of some kind.

He sets the others aside, all but the dagger and lighter, and reaches out to touch a spot under her breast, fingers trailing across her rib cage there, then he shifts closer, taking her arm and placing it around his shoulders to keep it out of the way. He sighs then, realizing he had been waiting for a sign to stop, a word from inside his head that she's bluffing, but only more silence comes. He holds the flame to the blade’s needle-sharp edge until it's white-hot. When he speaks, it's with his voice, whispered against her ear.

“Tu es à moi...jusqu'à la fin...” He presses the edge into her skin for the first line of the letter 'M', a searing hot cut that cauterizes itself, his body close to hers, his free arm wrapped around her to hold her to the spot.

The heat and the pain of that first cut make her gasp, every muscle in her body tightening, nails dug into the meat of his shoulder. Her eyes are clenched closed, her mouth a tight line, no sound but the ragged whimpers that unwittingly bubble out on the air of her exhale. Inside his head, however, the silence has broken: not for lack of concentration, but in a flood so strong, it could only have been intentional. Her thoughts come pouring into him with such force that, for the moment at least, they’re of one mind.

First, most immediately, is the pain, the sear and parted skin of each cut so present, it might as well be his own. He will feel this alongside her every step of the way. There’s near-silence in the air, but inside, she’s screaming. Deeper still, the more primal emotions of a wounded animal: confusion and betrayal. There are only a precious few seconds where she’s able to recall a specific memory, one she’d promised herself she’d hold on to so she could force him to relive it: her hand on her office door, Belphegor’s on top of it, her head tipped back to meet his eyes while she sends Amaya home to her family at his insistence that he take her home as some kind of prize. Then, Matt’s own voice, overlaid on the memory in a stilted echo: <i>...letting another demon feel you up...no doubt calculating if hitching your horse to a prince of hell is a better deal....thinking about fucking him...fine...stop acting like I don't know you...to the bone...you don't do, move, speak, or feel anything...benefit you...weigh...what you can...out of—</i>

The effort of recalling the memory is too great then, stuttering and breaking apart, the image along with it. Her thoughts become more erratic, images flashing as a comfort or distraction against the pain: the two of them on the plane to China for a job; sitting around a dinner table with Gabe in a slum from before; the <a href="https://www.nhu.bzh/wp-content/uploads/Parc-Hamelin-Oberth%C3%BCr-Rennes-Bretagne-1900x700_c.jpg">Parc Hamelin Oberthür</a> she hadn’t seen since she fled France at fifteen; each of them only present for a second before being swept into the deluge.

<i>Why is this happening?</i> Her inner voice has no lungs to stop screaming, but that doesn’t stop the breathless, wavering quality of the question when it rises. <i>You’re not supposed to hurt me. Why aren’t you protecting me? Why is this happening? Please, please...make it stop.</i> A turn of the knife pushes the breath from her chest, and she tucks her head into his neck, a cold sweat broken across her forehead, her neck and back. She’s clutching onto him, her body shaking in the quiet, voice a murmur through clenched teeth when she speaks into his skin.

“Keep going.”

The mental onslaught and transfer of pain clenches his jaw and snaps his eyes shut. Hearing his voice over the memory pushes the air out of his lungs, the shame of saying them, of feeling them, landing heavy like a boot in his belly. Parsing through the images as quickly as they come and go feels impossible, but he knows he'll never forget them. His breathing ratchets to a slow pant that he tries to control through a clenched jaw. His hand stills, retracts immediately when she asks him to stop, a reflex that he recognizes as part of their bond, but another force seems to be moving him to continue, even before she says to, before he decides to. His brows are furrowed in confusion and hesitation, he opens his mouth to say...what, he's not sure.

“Hold on...just a little longer...”

He sways with her a little before tightening the arm around her and holding her against him as she trembles. The next slash comes quick and deep, but controlled, and the heat is not as strong. he watches blood well up bright and drip from the half-finished letter and moves on to the next, then the last. He watches the blood well and slide from the neat cuts, and at first he doesn't understand what he's seeing. The blood reaches a certain point and begins to pool in a shape he doesn't recognize, in a manner that blood certainly shouldn't behave. Four small shapes, מ מ ו ן, and then they sizzle on her skin, like water across a hot pan, searing themselves into her flesh, smoking as they do so.

When the second and third cuts come, the forked V of the M causing one slash to intersect with another, she unconsciously begins to wriggle, struggles away from the blade despite holding on so tight that she can't feel her fingers. In their minds: flashes of her head colliding with his, shattering his nose, taking the blade and driving it into his chest, anything to make it stop, to get free. Her voice is an incomprehensible chorus of two thoughts layered discordantly on top of one another:

<i>pleasepleasefuckyoupleasefuckpleaseyoupleasepleasestopfuckyoupleasefuckyoupleasefuck</i>

It's not until the last long line that she cries out, her forehead pressed to his shoulder, the free hand that had clenched at her own thigh grabbing at his bicep, her nails digging half-moons into the skin. There's a brief moment of respite when all she can feel is air in the wound, the warm flood of blood down her side. She lets out a heaving breath, her face hidden in the crook of his neck. But then, the burn, so hot and fast, so many points of entry at once, unmoving like a hot brand. It takes her by surprise, and her head jolts back, looking into his face with betrayal, with tears spilling down her cheeks, unable to parse or even register the look on his face or the fact that his hand and the knife are no longer at her ribs. Then, as quickly as it came, the searing pain is gone, and she collapses into his arms, sweating and trembling.

It takes her several moments to come back to herself, aware that she needs to staunch the bleeding and stop the pain before the symptoms of shock set in. With a flex of some psychic muscle, the throbbing of the cuts mute and fall away, something she could have done at any moment to spare them both. She doesn’t look up while she blindly, shakily gropes for a brown drawstring sack on the floor beside them. She rummages by feel for a small pot of foul-smelling salve, gives it to him to uncap when her hands are too unsteady, and touches it along the outline of the M. When she does, the paste acts as a coagulant, the roughshod brand hardening into an ugly scab. When it's finished, she crumples with the effort, slumped against him, a hand on his thigh.

“...There. Now it's finished.”


He holds her tight, his arm flexing with the effort to keep her still but also to remind her he's there to keep her upright. The polyphonic chorus of conflicting exclamations blur together with the feeling of her nails threatening to break skin and her breath warm and uneven against his neck. He glances up at her when he can feel the sharp intake of breath, as sharp as the momentary pain of betrayal echoing through her to him, but he still can't explain it, looks just as mystified as she is. He drops the dagger, helps her to get the salve on and cradles her face in one hand, the other never faltering around her. His eyes are drawn to it again, the scab covered in the odorous salve, the edges angry-red and raw, and he still can't make out what it says.

His thumb swipes at the tear stains on her cheeks, smooths back the wild hairs sticking to her face before she collapses against him and he holds her. After a half second of hesitation, of fear that he'll get it wrong, that he's incapable of getting something meant to be comforting right, he smooths his palm over her back and exhales a low, quiet "shhh".

“It's finished...it's done now.”

He shifts and hauls them both to their feet before sweeping her legs and picking her up to carry her to his room. He closes the door behind him with one foot and sits on the edge of the bed with her cradled in his lap, waits patiently and quietly for her mind to calm before he speaks.

“When I suggested you could have some measure of revenge...I had hoped it would be more like punching or stabbing or even shooting me in the nuts…”

The sound, soft as it is, is a comfort, and she’s limp in his arms when he carries her to the bedroom, her arms around his neck and her face tucked into his chest. She wasn’t sure how she would feel when it was over, whether she would hate or fear him for doing what she’d asked. On the contrary, and perhaps due to the adrenaline that still pumps through her, he’s become the only thing she can feel or focus on. The heat of him warms her wet and sticky body, the familiar hard planes of his torso an anchor against which she rests. When he sets them down, she takes her time calming, a full few minutes of silence where the only sound in the air is their breaths as they gradually begin to even out. When he speaks, she huffs a laugh, opens bleary eyes to look up at him and smiles, punch drunk.

“...Well, now you know that if that’s what you want, you gotta ask. I take revenge very seriously.” Her gaze flicks down to her breast, unable to see or feel the wound beneath it beyond the dry and cracked salve’s restriction of her movement, and suddenly she remembers, her brows pushed together. “...What did you do to me? How...how did you that?”

“You keep telling me that...maybe one day I’ll learn that lesson, to ask for what I want...I can see that you do.” He exhales a long breath, realizing he hadn't taken in a full one since he'd started with her in the kitchen. Some of the tension leaves his shoulders and he looks down at the place where the mark appeared, seeing it in his mind again and trying to show her the 4 shapes that formed out of her blood and engraved themselves in her skin. He hesitates before he says the words, 3 simple words he rarely says and feels a true anxiety for having to ever admit. “I...don't know...I don't know how or why it happened, it just...I didn't mean to do it, I’m sorry.” Another two words that he very rarely expressed outside of sarcasm, but when they were true, there was nothing else to say. He hadn't meant for them to add to the pain, or the scar, and the feeling of betrayal she experienced, again, at their appearance is something he can't forget. “I mean...it wasn't...I wasn't trying to do that, it just happened. I’m not sure why, Lillith. But I’ll find out, once it heals...you don't feel...do you feel different at all?”

The image floats into her consciousness, and she searches her memory for someplace she’s seen before, finding nothing. His admission that he doesn’t know, then the apology that follows it make her ache, equally unseated by hearing them both back to back.

“...Wait, you didn’t...?” She remembers then, that moment of contact, of looking at his face, equally transfixed, and the knife in his hands at the side. “Is it...maybe you thought it. I don’t...I can’t remember what you were thinking, couldn’t find you, were you thinking something when it happened?” She takes a second to take stock of herself, searches for some part of her that’s missing, something that wasn’t there before, anything amiss, but finds nothing. “...No. no, everything’s the same, I think...but I guess if I was possessed or something, I wouldn’t know. is there someone else inside there?”

“I didn't think it either.” He sighs and feels the discomfort of being unsure and not knowing something deepen. “I...all I could hear was you. I was thinking about you. I was in your head, that's all I could do. How could I think it when I don't even know what it is? I just saw it happen...happening after I finished. But I couldn't stop looking at it.” He huffs, finding trouble regaining his humor just yet. “No one else is inside you. None of the second-rate dickhead demons and spirits we know get out of bed for free, I don't think we have to worry about them doing us any favors. Unless...unless you think...” He was hesitant to even speak it into existence, even if he knew to his core that it was practically impossible that Belphegor or anyone could inhabit her, the same body and soul that he was so intertwined with, that he owned a piece of. “No, it can't be that. No demon likes to share, after all, and like I said....you are mine.”

“...Do you feel anything looking at it now?” The thought crosses their minds almost simultaneously: that angled face, those sharp eyes, and the thought of him inhabiting her makes her shiver and tighten her hold on him, imperceptibly this time, a small admission that it’s him she’s holding to, not the anchor of his body. With the adrenaline beginning to fade, she’s becoming increasingly aware of her body, of the coolness of the room and the blood that’s smeared between them both, drying in the air. She reaches for a blanket or a piece of clothing to cover herself, remembering quickly that his space is never so messy as hers is and finding nothing.

“…I’m cold.” Outside of the space of the ritual, all of the previous malice and hurt has disappeared from her voice, sounding apologetic at the inconvenience it causes. “I’m yours...” When she says it this time, it doesn’t sound like punishment, instead like a gentle reassurance for the both of them, the same tenderness that she shows in the aftercare of their resurrection rituals. “...until the end.”

“I think...” For the first time of the night he has to stop to assess himself, admit to himself that he was exhausted, but wasn't sure why.Tthat he did feel some pull, some gravity shift deep within himself when the mark appeared, and now he realizes there was a sound. Underneath her screams and discordant pleading, something he can barely remember, and the act of trying to remember fills his chest with heat and his nose with the scent of extinguished matches. “I think there was a sound, but I can't describe it.”

A beat passes and he sees the things he's seen in his dreams before: his childhood home in Canarsie, the world cast in an unnatural shades of gray and blue, the bricks crumbling to black ash and the windows burnt out like a ghoulish face he stands in front of. He can't look away, but he always knows there is something behind him he must eventually face. The images are gone again suddenly, and he stands with her, carrying her to the bathroom and sitting her on the countertop. he retrieves a clean towel to wrap around her shoulders, and wets a cloth under the sink to clean the blood off her. He rinses it, then presses it to her neck, then her face more gently. “I need to see it again...just for a second.” He cups his hand under the sink, bringing warm water to the places on her skin, rinsing the scab and salve and blood, catching the runoff with a hand towel. He stands between her legs, leaning to peer at it and hears a low hum, just loud enough to notice. He can't look away for several seconds, reaching out to touch the mark without thinking, forgetting how raw it must be.

She can feel the shift in him, as though the world is suddenly vibrating at a different frequency, lower and deeper inside. But then, as his memory goes to that place, she hits a wall. This isn't the same resistance she's found when he shuts her out, but a barrier, as though she'd somehow reached the outermost limits, as though he had gone to someplace she both couldn't have access to, but wanted to follow him to at a molecular level. It only lasts for that second he's gone away, but for that moment, she wants to serve, to die for whatever blackness is on the other side of that wall. But then it's gone again when his dreams have lifted, and she catches her breath on the walk to the bathroom.

“...Where did you go just now?” she asks, dazed, the question murmured so softly he might not hear it at all. “You went somewhere, and I couldn't find you.” But she doesn't seem to need an answer, allows him to lift and manipulate her until he's made her clean. When he presses the cloth to her face, she looks into his eyes, searching for that presence she'd felt before but couldn't see. For a second, she thinks that maybe she had imagined it until he leans in to look at it again. The closer he gets, the longer he lingers, the more she can feel that presence on the other side of the wall, desperate for it to find its way in and to her side where it belonged. Her body sways imperceptibly toward him, her eyes closed, a shift in gravity. The moment he touches it, that tether shatters, the pain jarring her awake when she reflexively pushes him away with a yelp. “Fils de pute! Ow, fuck. Why did you do that?!”

“Fuck...I forgot...okay! I forgot, I won't touch it!” He jerks his hand away, surprised that he touched it. It was the oddest sensation of being so distracted, so drawn and commanded to see it, to touch it, to try again to hear that sound he can't place. He wasn't accustomed at all to not feeling total control over his own urges, to not having a cognitive grasp on what the fuck was happening. “I wasn't...I had to touch it, I can't explain it.”

He sounds frustrated, a little defensive that she couldn't understand that he had to touch it, he didn't think about it, or just want to, there was no other action he could take at that moment, he was meant to. He sighs and leans against the counter top, palms flat. He rests his head on her shoulder a moment, rubbing his face against her skin roughly before he pulls back and starts to become aware of her body and his for the first time since they started, like a fog was lifting and clarity was returning, and with that clarity an awareness of the closeness and warmth of her naked body.

 “Well this was a fantastic idea...” he mumbles sarcastically and leans over the sink to scoop cool water onto his face, wetting his hair and the back of his neck to 'wake' himself up gradually.  “I don't know where I went...I thought you could see it. It's a place from my dreams, my home back in Brooklyn, except the world is...destroyed or maybe never was. My house is ruins and I know there's something or...a place behind me, but I've never turned around. I don't know what's there...it's probably not even real.” He stands again, lets the water drip down his neck and twists to take his shirt off. “You want a grilled cheese or something?”

While she listens, her face gradually melts from hurt, to irritation, to confusion and concern, as undone as he is by such a lapse in his control. She cradles the back of his head for the few moments he's there, the sense memory of that presence and her need to be known by it dissipating like steam. She watches him clean up and gingerly slides from the countertop. The intrusion of that moment of connection and pain interrupted the suppression she'd had in place, and she sucks in a breath through her teeth when she hits the floor and a sharp spike lances through her side, redoubling her focus to clamp down on it again. Still, she's careful, afraid of breaking the skin again as she pads back into the bedroom, searching for one of his hoodies and carefully sliding it on her shoulders. She pushes up the sleeves, grateful that there's room enough that she's warm and covered without the fabric touching her skin. She carefully considers what he says, turns back to him.

“You disappeared, it was...I can't explain it. Like you went through a door or a wall...I could feel you there with…something. Someone. I don't know. It was...I wanted to fucking destroy myself trying to get to it, back to you. Wherever you went, whatever place or thing is behind you...that's it. That's where the bond lives.” A beat, and the truth of both of those things settles on her like a weight too big to bear, and she blinks when she meets his eyes. “...I do. So fucking bad. I’m starving.”</div></tr>