yez thiz became an excuze to advertize zome of my favorite media. alzo of that iz clothing i do in fact have, emh hat and all. yippee
The doctor has a touch like death: chempowder grit beneath the nails, corpse-cool and smooth as stone, prodding his throat like a butcher peeling through layers of rotted meat.
And perhaps that's what he feels like, laid flat on his table: his clothes soaked with sweat, his vision swimming in pink-black-blue. A buck waiting to be skinned. A fish half-gutted.
The fingerpads are too thin, too feeble. They reek not of tobacco, but parchment and must.
"Breathe, boy."
Silco's no boy—but hardly is he human, either, after the black depths he crawled himself out of: a wet womb of industrial filth, his City one with his veins, its slow decay as promised as his slow-shanked slow-bleeding black-shredded heart.
The damned organ beat stubbornly on: boat thrashing to the waves. It kept only a shell still-moving.
A thumb skirts down his pulse-point, and presses. The bruising twinges, simmers, aches. "Narrowly avoided a fracture," gruffs the vulture over him.
It takes two attempts to swallow. "Shall I count myself lucky?"
The words no longer belong to him. His voice lays repackaged beneath a cannibalistic fervor: the kind lent only to night-creatures that peel the flesh from the living and pick their teeth with the dead.
"Luck is that you can speak, at all." The touch eases. "Avoid it, for now."
Sensationless, half-blind, prickling, the doctor leaves him. In the stillness, his own hand stumbles across his clavicle: itches spindly fingers across the frayed collar of his linens, slops heavy-clammy-cold to the slope of his neck.
A pulse drums beneath his palm. His own body. Yes, Kindreds, his own wretched body.
Still alive.
His nails sink in.
Still alive.
Ease.
Still alive.
(And so is he. So is he. So is he.)
"Breathe, boy."
Air shudders from his throat. Shivers against the weight of his palm; his blood beating, beating, beating.
"How long?" he gristles out.
A rattle of metal at the wheeled tray. The doctor's stare skims over him, like a lick of heat from a pyre. "Yours is...a unique case. Some have lasted years. Most succumb, within months." But. But. "At the rate the infection is spreading—"
Beating, beating, beating.
"How long?"
As long as Vander is still living. As long as his knife still sits squeezed between his blood-tipped nails, scratched leather and steel, bone-handled ache. As long as there are still bones to pick his teeth with, hunger to fill, a vision he does not need two damned eyes to see: a glory, a rain of hellfire, a retribution, a need—
Their city's starvation in his veins. Their city's future, blazing in bilge-fire.
"Twice a day," the doctor mutters, a glass vial tacked to the table's edge. "Log your symptoms, every morning. Stay off the smoke."
Silco's thumb stutters beneath his jaw.
He's used to a life without answers. In the noxious wastes of the Sump, he made his peace with it.
This wraith doubts it.
"I won't die, doctor." A beast sears to life beneath his hand, dragon-fang, daggers in the words: grits off the walls, like a spirit's clawscratch. "I can't." Three octaves grappling for purchase: silk and stone and fire at his cheek.
But he will, one day. By Janna's blessing alone, he will.
(And so will he. So will he. So will he.)
silco and singed / low doses
