The Ends of Time
Characters: Nathaniel, Simon (@thedarknesssings), Sebastian (@lawwritteninblood), Rafael (@houserosaire), Aamir (@gorgagne-viperidae)
Content Warning: Blood.
“What would be your perfect world, Nathaniel?” It had been a cruel question asked of him.
“I don’t know.” Nathaniel had lied. He knew. He had always known what his idea of paradise was. But his idea of paradise was not everyone’s idea of paradise, and they deserved the chance to make their own choices, didn’t they? Selfish, hungry monster in the dark. Make a choice, but make a choice you can live with for all of your days. It’ll be the last chance you ever have to change things.
Life had been far from perfect before their ill-fated traversing through time and the universe. The multiverse? He studied the occult and still struggled with the enormity of what they had touched. These were things that were going to haunt him for the rest of his life, whether he wanted to or not.
But he knew that perfection, to him, was most decidedly not the idyllic place that they had been put. Paradise never was. He had said that the night they had agreed to give Chronos the gems. But he had let them continue onward, forward into a set of nights that welcomed them. Gods, Marcel once told him in their theological debates, were often seen as capricious and cruel, kind and benevolent in equal measure. And Chronos had proved no different.
His perfect world, he had finally settled on, was exactly what they had left behind, full of the people within it. Of those important to them restored. It was what any of them had wanted when they first agreed to give Chronos back his gems. Not that Nathaniel thought any good would come from keeping them to start with.
And so back, Chronos had wound their world. Back he had put them, on the right course. Back on a set of docks, at the edge of a warzone. People they cared for had died there. Marcel. Liam. Esra. They had this one, final chance to put things right. And so they ran.
They ran, and Rafael danced through the battlefield with a pair of blades in his hand and cut through the Inquisition with an elegance that Nathaniel felt he would never truly be able to appreciate. Aamir’s stealth wore down the edges of the great ring their little warzone had become, and lines of laser light faded as he did his work time and time again, a silent killer with an efficiency the others may never quite match.
Sebastian had faded into a living shadow and one after another, people dropped, clutching at throats, struggling to breathe through the inhuman figure that the lawyer had become. He himself had cut a swathe through bodies, sword cane lunging deep as old fencing lessons flowed back into his head like second nature.
And when it was done, when they stood in a ring with their sires and paramours and these people who they had come to save, did Nathaniel lift his gaze. Simon Frost, standing among the victorious. He should have been elated.
Simon, his Simon, at last.
Relief warred with the dread in his stomach, and in the end, he let himself leave with the others. He turned, gazing out the window as the vehicle that held Simon, Caleb, Liam, and Rafael pulled off in an opposite direction from the one that Aamir took him and Sebastian. In the end, Nathaniel had ended up back at his book shop alone.
Well, alone would be an oversimplification. He was bloody when he walked in through the door, a right mess from the fighting down at the docks. And though it was clear from the look on Jacob’s face that he longed to ask what had happened to leave Nathaniel looking so damned haunted, the man had ended up just finishing tending the shop for the evening, giving the blonde his space.
Nathaniel had turned the lock on his apartment door as he trooped down the stairs. Jacob had closed up dozens of times without ever bothering him. And he expected tonight to be no different. It wasn’t the townhouse. It wasn’t paradise. It wasn’t even the room he sometimes shared with Simon, but it was his. And right now he deeply needed the sanctuary of a space that was untainted with memories of the black haired man.
Hands reached up to pull free the messy bun that he had whipped his hair into before the battle, and pale hair stained so red he nearly matched Rafael’s usual strawberry blonde spilled down his back. It clung in places, sticky and unwilling to let go while so much vitae coated the strands. A hand reached into the shower and he cranked the water to let it warm while he turned to stare into the mirror.
He looked a mess, not pretty even with all of the blood that coated him. His appetite was quiet, his beast sated during the fighting. What bothered him were his eyes. A hazel stare that he usually considered sharp and alert looked exhausted. Shadowed. Deep bruises that he wanted to chalk up to exhaustion ruined his flawless appearance beneath them.
“I ate your name. Now you belong to me and no one else.”
An ugly memory turned his gaze from the reflective surface and he stepped into the shower still fully clothed. Hot water beat down on him, made black fabric cling to his lanky frame. He fell back against the plain tile, and the enormity of what had happened to them finally hit him in a wash that left him trembling.
They had endured so much. So painfully much. He had seen so many facets of his lover he was sure he was never meant to see. Had witnessed a cruelty that he was certain the other man would have never wanted him to realize was in him. Was it in him? Could he really call these other versions of him in his memories, ‘him’?
He let his legs fall loose and slid down the tile to rest on the floor. He stayed there, red running off his clothing and out of his hair, staining the water. Nathaniel curled in on himself, his legs shifting up to rest against his chest. His arms draped across them, and his head slid back, resting against the tile.
He wasn’t sure how much of each other version of Simon he would see mirrored in the one that occupied the bed beside him as they fell into day-sleep with each rising of the sun. One of his hands lifted, smoothing across his face. Only the Simon of 1810 had been the one that he would get to meet again in the future, so he had thought. But even that had been unwritten in order to save those they had known.
A letter never written. Never sent. Never delivered. And perhaps that was for the best. But that didn’t change the things that had happened to him there. He had shown him his signet ring, and Simon had believed them. Believed him. He had no cause or provocation, but he believed him.
And the way he had acted after the garden? Like a man possessed, held back from potentially killing Aamir over a broken leg. He had healed. A single day-sleep had fixed that wound readily enough. And he didn’t blame Aamir for hurting him; he’d been dominated, and he’d have expected the same from any of them. Stopping him by any means they had available to them.
That Simon had been like a shadow when he left. Would he oppose him, or be willing to stand with him? It had been a hard question, and one Nathaniel hadn’t wanted to answer at the time. Didn’t have a proper answer. He had bared as much of his heart as he was willing to, and then wrote him that letter in the intervening time before he left.
And then everything had gone awful. Chronos and that terrible first place with the tower of flesh. The last semblances of the Simon that he loved and knew and wanted. He had told him he loved him, afraid he might never get a chance to say it again. And then he’d been forced to admit it again. And again. And again. Each time, to the wrong Simon.
And now that he had the opportunity, he wasn’t certain he could look at his Simon, to give him those same words. He finally lifted his head from the back of the shower when the water falling on him ran almost bitterly cold. He pushed to stand, and it took minutes for him to strip himself free. Cleaning away the remnant blood from his hair and nails was easy, and when he stepped free of the shower a few minutes later, he pulled on the thick black bathrobe that hung beside it on its hook.
He felt chilled still, but it had nothing to do with shower he’d taken, and everything to do with the events of the last two places they had been. In one, he endured knowing that the last thing he did was rip Simon’s throat out so they could get home. In the next, he told him that he loved him, and was erased for his trouble.
His steps finally carried him back out of the bathroom on bare feet to prowl to the many occult books he had collected and gathered. Things that would damn them if they weren’t all labeled as fantasy novels. He had always been so careful with anything he bound and kept here. Pages upon pages written in his hands. Lineages and traces and lines. Wait, there it was. Elders of note.
He fetched his phone from the place he had laid it when he first walked in─he didn’t even remember doing it but muscle memory must have kicked in because there it lay just to the side of the stairwell in its usual place in the ornate basket he used─and then with book and phone in his grasp, he crawled into the broad bed that was his own. His fingers hesitated as he brought up the number he wanted.
His thumb however over the send button before he pressed it.
We need to talk, eventually. - N
The reply was more abrupt than he had expected, a soft ding before he even had time to properly set it back down on the bed nearby him. As if Simon had been waiting for him. Had he?
Come home and we can. - S
He tried to reply. He did.
Tomorrow. Maybe. I don’t know. -N
He cursed under his breath, the words uncharitable. Simon wouldn’t understand why he had suddenly changed. Gone from taking any chance he could get to be at his side, to avoiding him. The message was deleted, and though he tried again, to find the right collection of words, he ended up simply leaving the whole thing blank. Simon’s message had been read, and if that was all the man would know about it, that would have to be enough tonight.
Nathaniel leaned back, propping himself up on the pillows as he opened the book before him. Lineage and elders. Figures of myth and legend. Something that could consume names. He would only know if he asked. But first, he had other things he wanted to ask. But that too, would be a problem for tomorrow. Maybe by then, after day-sleep was finished, he would have the fortitude to face down Simon.
The book was lain aside at last, and he curled down onto his side. His body still ached. But perhaps worse still was this painful throb at the center of his chest. How could he stand to love a man who had been all too willing to destroy him? And how much of the Simon’s he had faced, did his Simon possess?
He had no answers.
He could only pray that tomorrow’s sunset brought him either clarity, or certainty. For now he was in far too short supply of either, with a heart too wary to hope.
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