2020-08-16 12:46:29 ¶ ●

You know what? I can post WIPs here.
now you’ll always be good to me
Rating: M
Pairing: Peter/Elias
Summary: The thing about a sacrifice is that it isn’t a sacrifice if it doesn’t hurt. The thing about Jonah Magnus is that he’ll do anything to get what he wants.

After the apocalypse, Jonah finds himself wanting for company.

—

Just make sure to leave the door open, he tells Peter, and to his credit, Peter does. Just a crack, but it’s enough for Jon to get his fingers in.

When Jon comes bursting back out, wisps of fog curling off him and Martin both, he knocks the door wide open and leaves it - so to speak - hanging off one bent hinge.

Normally, Jonah wouldn’t step a foot in Forsaken except out of direst need. Even with Peter as a guide, it’s terribly dangerous; he hadn’t lied at all when he told Jon it was almost certain death. Devoid of its mortal anchor, now, this pocket of it is soon to collapse in on itself, devouring anything left within.

But he doesn’t need long. The place is badly damaged, scored raw with its guts out and quivering in the air, and he finds what he’s looking for just inside its boundaries.

The thing about Forsaken is that it consumes those who serve it the same way that it sustains them. Peter Lukas was not, strictly speaking, a man any longer, and had not been for some time. He was a shape filled up with fog, a heart that would have stopped beating decades ago if it weren’t frozen. So there are no bones for Jonah to recover, no memento mori for him to hold on maudlin evenings.

There is a necklace, though, glittering in the dull grit of the shoreside. (There is no sea here, in this version of Forsaken. Just an endless foggy shore and the smell of salt and the distant sound of waves from all around.) Jonah stoops and snags it up, shaking it a bit to dislodge the sand. The chain is solid steel, the whistle ancient, polished brass. Jonah wears his own ring on a similar chain around his neck; Peter, as far as he knows, always kept his in his sea-chest aboard the Tundra.

“I did tell you to leave,” he remarks to the emptiness. Distantly, a wave crashes to shore, then rolls back out, and the wind picks up a bit, but the damp and pressing clouds of fog do not move.

He turns, and leaves, and perches on the edge of the dais upon which his first body is enthroned, and lets the chain slip through his fingers. Most likely, Nathaniel would like the boatswain’s call back. It’s nearly as old a family heirloom as Jonah himself.

Luckily, Jonah does not think he need concern himself overly much with what Nathaniel Lukas wants anymore. Above him, his Institute - the work of centuries, lifetimes, the temple built with his own hands - is falling. He casts his gaze from eye to eye, peering out of terrified faces and emotionless cameras both, and watches the blood and the smoke and the screaming.

It hurts, yes. Birth pangs, he tells himself. Bringing new life into the world is always a bloody, painful business - but, oh, how sweet will be the fruit of this labor.

—

“Tell me, Doctor -” he pauses to sip at his drink, the pleasant burn of the whisky sliding down his throat, and looks sidelong at Jonathan, pleased to catch the split second where Jonathan bites his lower lip at being so addressed - “do you believe in the human soul?”

“You ought to be careful saying things of that nature,” Jonathan murmurs, but it is truly only a reflex, simply another step of the dance between them. Were Jonathan to ever truly desire Jonah’s downfall, why, he has much more damning secrets to hand than casual blasphemy over evening drinks.

“You’re avoiding the question.” Jonah swirls his whisky in its tumbler, watching the way the flickering light from the gaslamp catches it and shoots it through with gold and orange. “I’m truly curious. Who better to settle the matter than a man of medicine?”

“A priest, perhaps?” When this wit receives no response save the pointed lift of Jonah’s brows, Jonathan sighs and settles back in his chair, hands laced together over his chest. “I will not be tempted into another debate of spiritual matters with you at this hour, but I can say this. I’ve been present at births, and privy to the moment where the babe comes sliding free from the mother’s body. Have you ever witnessed such a thing? No, I suppose not -”

“I’m not wholly unfamiliar with the childbed,” Jonah snaps before he can consider the wisdom of it. In the instant of silence that follows, Jonathan’s face becomes a still and careful mask, and Jonah has to wonder if he made such a needling remark on purpose, if he knew that being blithely told he does not know something might drive Jonah to admit such a thing. More damning secrets indeed.

Jonathan does not inquire further. He simply clears his throat, after a moment, and continues. “Well, then. There is a moment which I have seen, time and time again, where the body of the child - how do I say this?” He frowns into the middle distance, brow wrinkled in thought. “There is a moment where I am simply holding a body, a vessel, all slick with blood and unmoving. And then the very next moment something fills it, and it’s no longer simply a - a thing which is shaped like a person. It breathes and moves and cries and it is alive and human. But there is that moment, Jonah, which I have seen, before that - that spirit, or soul, or whatever it is you wish to call it, that animating force, comes upon the body.”

Jonah does not think about the thing he is not thinking about - he’d been at entirely the wrong vantage point to see such a thing, anyway - and instead, he thinks about calving season. It’s been a proper long time since he thought on his father’s herds, but it’s one of the sweeter memories he can summon up. Why, he bets if he puts his mind to it, he can still remember one of the old cattle calls -But no. That’s not the point. The point is that - well, he doesn’t think, exactly, that a cow has a soul. That surely is blasphemy. Although Robert does have some fascinating views on slaughterhouse fear, which would imply -

But he’s seen the moment Jonathan is speaking of himself, the sudden swift change between a thing being simply warm meat and a thing being alive -

“And the reverse?” he asks lightly. He is thinking now of William Bennett, whose deathbed he attended so loyally. He is thinking now of a babe in the crib - just a girl, no doubt why William wasn’t more fussed when she died - she’ll have a proper English name, none of your heathen gabble - God above, or Gods, or things which were the antithesis of any God he had ever been raised to know - he had not mourned that man.

“Are you asking if I’ve watched a man die?” Jonathan’s eyes pin him in place, so dark, so deep. What a stunning intellect is his, what a marvel is his mind. Out of them all, he is the only one who Jonah truly believes to be his equal, save perhaps Robert. “Of course I’ve seen such a thing. Medicine can only do so much. And I would say that, yes, I have seen the reverse of this gift of life. The moment that the soul leaves - well, I would say that often the life is extinguished so suddenly that one can’t see a transition, but there have been times… a more drawn-out death, perhaps, a long illness… I believe I have seen the body devoid of any human soul, yes, simply suffering meat.”

“So you do believe in such a thing, then?”

“I suppose I do.” Jonathan shrugs, a wry twist to his mouth. “I cannot say I have ever found a place where such might be stored in any of the cadavers I have dissected. No room in the chambers of the heart, no, nor the wrinkles of the brain, nor the contortions of the gut - and yet I have seen this thing come into and leave a human body, so I must conclude, based on the evidence of my own eyes, that it exists.”

—

He knows more, now. He understands the convolutions of the brain, now, the way that memory exists in the endless space between neurons. And yet he knows so much less than he thought he had about the nature of being, of what makes a man into the person he is.

There was the concept of blood, once, of country and breeding. The topography of the head as a signifier of the mind that lay below. Humors, devils, miasmas. Character and spirit, some indefinable thing that had to be carefully raised, grown and pruned, lest a child go rotten.

And now there are such things as genes, as neurotransmitters. There is the endless debate of nature versus nurture. What makes a man who he is? Is it something like the soul? Is it the sum total of his memories and experiences? Is it in the shape of the brain itself?

What is the nature of a memory? Does it have weight or substance? Can it be observed? Jonah can wind a memory out of a man’s head or weave it back in amongst that man’s own natural thoughts, as true and vivid as when it was first experienced, but what is it?

Back in his first life, Jonah had looked with some scorn on the ways his fellows spoke of how men were made. He’d broken himself down for parts and built a more suitable vessel from the ground up, and they spoke of blood and breeding and the lines of family as if it meant anything at all, as if they’d done something especially clever by having been born of the mothers and fathers who had begat them. He’d thought he’d known, then, what it was to create oneself.

Now, though, having poured his own essence into half a dozen new vessels, he can admit that he does not. The failure to know does eat at him, an unscratchable itch in the back of his own mind - and what, really, is his mind?

Take Elias Bouchard. He had been a man, once, all on his own. All of his memories, whatever those might be, live still within the brain that sits in the skull from which Jonah’s eyes stare out at the world, and yet where is he?

And what is it of Jonah, truly, that passes from vessel to vessel? All the memories of his long life, are they perhaps simply so many that they overpower the memories of the host? Is it his soul, then, that passes with his eyes? The eyes are the windows to the soul, but there was never anything of Jonah in Elias Bouchard before those eyes were put into his sockets, so whose soul, really, do they give a window to?

The only thing he carries between bodies - eyes aside, and for all the whimsy of the poets, those are simply wet spheres of jelly - are those memories. Weighty, for all that they do not have weight, and solid, for all that they lack any real form, enough to drive out the dominating spirit of whichever body he chooses. There, then, in that commonality, must lie the answer to the question.

—

The thing about the Powers is that they don’t exactly work scientifically. It’s always more of a faerie logic kind of deal. There is no reason that removing the eyes from his own head and putting them in someone else’s bloody sockets ought to do anything other than give the both of them a nasty infection, but, well, it’s metaphorically significant. It’s emotionally resonant. And that’s how the Powers work.

Jonah has never been a man of science, strictly speaking. He keeps up on developments, of course, because he wants to know - well, everything. He’s actually quite proud of how close he’s come, though the nature of the beast is that the more knowledge he accrues, the more deeply he understands that having all of it is actually impossible.

(That’s not, really, what he’s for, anyway. That’s what his Archive is for.)

But it’s never much troubled him - the way it had sometimes troubled Jonathan Fanshawe, or some of their more literal-minded gentleman friends - how dealing with the Powers is more like navigating a waking dream. The surreality of it has always made an intuitive sort of sense to him. It’s more about feeling than thinking, more about the gesture than the outcome.

So maybe, were he a more literal sort of man, with a more classically academic sort of mind, it might not even occur to him to do what he does. He isn’t, though, and so he sits there on his throne and looks out over the beautiful world of terror which he has wrought, and reaches up to touch the brass call hanging around his neck, and closes his eyes, and still sees absolutely everything, and reaches out to the great Eye above, which is unspeakably far away and also right there, right over him, right inside of him

And he asks, Give me Peter Lukas.

And it does.