2024-08-30 3:09:03 ¶ ● ⬈

somuchbetterthanthat:

> > Jonelias day 3! It’s when people start to realize that, wait, I truly do have an endless recurring theme, huh.
> > Setting: sick // Prompt: confessions

> This… was not what Elias had expected. The goal, of course, had always been for Jon to be marked by the encounter in some fashion, and Elias had been eagerly waiting for it. This was to be the first stepping stone to his grand and final plan, after all, the apotheosis of centuries of work – And yet, as Jon laid down on the ground, worms burrying into his skin, there had been no satisfaction whatsoever.

> Hours later, Jon trembling with fever in Elias’s bed, Elias still couldn’t make out what had gone wrong – or, rather, he feared he understood too well, but the idea was so ludicrous it was hard to entertain.

> Half gone from both the sickness and the medication he’d taken for it, Jon was murmuring under his breath bribes of statements, mostly from the Corruption, his voice regularly shifting to the pitch of Jane Prentiss. Elias sat next to him, running a fresh wet towel over his face and neck, and kept staring, and staring, and staring.

> Jon was going to be better in the morning – he was too tied to the Institute for a few worms to claim him, and even if he hadn’t, the spiders were protecting him; a few had slipped under his tongue a couple of hours ago, no doubt to devour the last remains of the unwanted parasites. Elias ought to let them to it, ought to let Jon to it, have him fully take in the encounter so that he may wake up stronger, changed, more beautiful still than he’d already been –

> But he couldn’t. Just as he hadn’t been able to stop himself from bringing Jon home to him, ignoring Jon’s fervent and exhausted insistence he was going to be just fine on him own despite having fainted mere minutes before, while finishing to interview Martin. Just he hadn’t been able to stop his arm from pulling the handle of the fire sprinklers much earlier than first planned.

> Keep reading