Chapter Text
You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince, and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else that you did not go to hell the last night; that you were suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep. And there is no other reason to be given why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God's hand has held you up. - Jonathan Edwards
It wasn’t so hard to look at him in the long shadows of her mother’s old bedroom and she was grateful for it - not so much because his burns were unsightly, but because she couldn’t even begin to imagine the pain of it, seared right down to the bone past fat, tendon, and muscle alike. How he had survived at all, much less mustered the strength to move or even stand upright, was beyond her.
The bite had been quick but painful and she’d done her best not to let on just how painful. He couldn’t help what he was. He could only help how he dealt with things, given his lot in life. She’d stared resolutely at the ugly yellow curtains on the back wall while he’d lapped at the wound and after he opened his eyes, he looked up at her with all the wide-eyed melancholy of a dog that’s jumped onto the counter and eaten the roast while his master was out. She raised a quizzical brow and managed a half-smile.
“Well, it can’t be much harder on me than your typical blood drive. Do I need to eat a big chocolate chip cookie now or somethin?” He chuckled, and she winced at how guttural it sounded. “But forget that, what do you need next? How much blood?”
“I don’t rightly know.”
“Well, as you probably remember, the nearest hospital doesn’t keep a close eye on their blood bank. I’ll be in and out of there in a jiffy - you just stay here and rest. My uncle’s in the next room and I already called in for him so he won’t be working tomorrow, but he won’t be doing anything other than laying on the couch for a good long while. He never gets visitors, so you’ll be safe here. Just...keep the curtains drawn, alright? Don’t hurt yourself on my account...please. I don’t know you well enough to give you reasons to live, but I know Jesse Custer’s goddamn ego ain’t reason enough to die. Promise me.” She lowered herself into a crouch and looked him in the eye.
Cassidy nodded and returned her gaze. “I promise.”
“Alright then. I’ll be back soon.” She closed the door behind her.
“Tulip,” he called through the door. “Might be best if yeh locked it. Don’t want anyone finding little ol me in here on accident.” So she did.
Ten blood bags seemed a reasonable number in her opinion. Not so many that she felt guilty about it, and not so few that she didn’t think they’d do the job. On the way back from the hospital, she’d stopped by the pharmacy (where she thankfully wasn’t recognized as last week’s opiate thief) and bought whatever she thought might help.
“Got a few bags of every type, ‘cause I wasn’t sure which was your favorite.” He was huddled in her blanket in the corner and she lay them out in a row at his feet, the labels clearly visible.
He snorted. “I feel like I’m in a spa.”
“Speakin’ a which, I’ve got aloe vera, an oatmeal bath treatment, and sunscreen. For later, you know, once you’ve healed up a bit.”
He looked up at her with searching eyes and upturned brows. “Tulip,” he murmured in a voice that was barely audible but still characteristic of the way he always said her name - “Toolip.” He’d let it linger in his mouth, as if he liked the feel of it. Wanted to keep it for himself. And if the day’s events had taught her anything, Cassidy’s loyalty to Jesse really was as overindulgent as it seemed, so his feelings for her were likely as passionate as he made them out to be. For whatever good that would do them.
“Don’t look at me like that. You’re gonna have skin to slather with that sunscreen again, eventually.” She wasn’t too sure, herself, but she always did put her bets on the out-of-towner. Cassidy was about as out-of-town as you ever got. She extended a hand to him, offering him a bag of Type B. “I’ve opened all of them a smidge, so you don’t have to do it yourself since your fingers aren’t up for much. Just make sure you don’t squeeze too hard when you pick em up or they’ll spray everywhere.”
He cradled the bag in his blackened palms and she turned to go, speaking over her shoulder as she went. “I’m headed to Toadvine to play a few hands and make a little dough. There’s still a coupla good ole boys in this town who won’t expect a hustle from the likes-a me. Uncle’s cell phone’s on the dresser and my number’s the only one in it. Call it if you need me and I’ll be back lickety-split - Toadvine ain’t far from here.”
Tulip grabbed her keys from the bedside table and headed out the door, locking it behind her. All the years she’d spent looking after deadbeats and working girls in this jerkwater town, and no one had ever looked at her like that. She didn’t like the way his dark eyes followed her around the room as if every moment doing otherwise was wasted, and every moment fixed on her was his last.
Bloodlust was more a burning than a hunger, a slow acidic scalding in the lining of the gut that seared its way outward until you were blind with it, blind to all but heat and movement and the faint frantic thrumming of anything with a pulse slower and weaker than you, which was everything. There was always a danger of burning, from the inside out as much as the outside in.
He’d squeezed all the bags dry with trembling hands, not bothering to lick up the blood he’d slopped onto the floor because he knew there was nothing for it. It’s not that it wasn’t enough, it’s that it’d gone stale. Not that it had ever mattered to him before, but nothing but fresh blood was going to do the trick this time. He’d hardly healed at all, and in the meantime, conscious thought was near impossible. It’d be all too easy to drop any pretense of self-control, and it was only the thought of Tulip with her smooth brown neck in tatters, her skin between his teeth before either of them could blink the minute she unlocked that door, that kept him from letting go altogether. That and the bog witch.
She’d snaked her liver-spotted arms around his shoulders and sunk her teeth into his neck before Cassidy could so much as protest. Billy shot her square in the eye before she could drink deep enough to kill him outright and her body dropped straight as a stone down the slope of the riverbank and into the shallows of the bog below, nails dug deep enough into his shoulder to tear into the kelly green of his Irish Volunteer Army uniform and the exposed flesh below.
“Proinsias!” he heard Billy call from above and nothing more as the base of his skull connected with a river rock.
He woke once that he could remember in the interim, a sharp throbbing in his head and a searing pain spreading across his face. Gingerly, he pushed himself upright, catching sight of himself on the water’s surface. In what was left of the ebbing light of day, he could make out nothing that he recognized - just a pair of eyes staring out of a fleshless red mass of blood and nerves. He tried to scream but could do little more than wheeze with the mangled remains of his throat. Cassidy whipped around where he stood looking for the hag or his brother, but both were gone without a trace. Further inland, the plaintive bleat of a lost sheep hock-deep in a muddy pit nearly scared him out of what was left of his skin and he was seized with a sudden inexplicable hunger. Acting on instincts his oxygen-starved brain couldn’t begin to process, he ran full-pelt towards the unfortunate animal and went for the jugular, gnawing through fur and sinew to the veins beneath with a clumsy jerk of his jaw to the right. The bleating stopped. Blood gushed from the wound and he lapped at the severed arteries in a mindless frenzy, flinching at every pump of the dying creature’s heart. Sated, he pulled back from the gaping maw he’d opened in its throat and choked in surprise as he felt the press of flesh against his windpipe and the scabby, clotted pulp of his face. Cassidy stumbled backwards and into the muck and again, there was enough light left that he could make out his face in the muddy water below, somehow whole and intact, his pain gone. Had he imagined it all? He’d never once hallucinated before. But there were stories of soldiers haunted by war imagining horrible things even away from the battlefield. Perhaps this was just that.
His hands were shaking, and looking at them, he remembered the sheep and how its heart had pumped fountains of blood through the gash he’d torn in its throat. He wet his lip and tasted it there, coppery and warm. And its body lay there in the rushes, real enough. So that, at least, was true. Was this what soldiers did when the heat of battle went to their heads? He’d never heard of such a thing. Besides, he hadn’t seen real battle. He’d never fired a bullet. Billy had made sure of that, bless him. But why had he left him there? He’d seen him through all this only to leave him at the bottom of a bog with some withered old crone. It wasn’t Billy’s way, but he was sure there was a reason.
Cassidy shook his head in irritation, waving off the cloud of gnats hovering close to his brow. He’d never heard gnats so loud. Everything had seemed over-loud and bright since he woke up, but he’d assumed it was to do with coming to his senses. And the stink of the bog was pervasive; it was all he could do not to gag.
There was nothing for it. He’d have to make it back to Dublin on his own. And wouldn’t Billy be proud to see him come safely home, on his own as a man ought? His uniform was so encrusted with grime that no one would be able to make out the green underneath and he could pass as just another dirty Irishman so long as he kept his head down and his wits about him.
Unable to sleep through the noise and stink of the bog, Cassidy walked through the night, keeping to the trees off the side of the main road. He saw no one and was feeling quite at ease when the sun began to rise.
It was just an itching around the collar at first, and then a sharp prickling all over that quickly perforated the outer layer of his skin and burned like nothing he’d ever felt, as if he’d burst into flame. Which in fact, he had.
Screaming and flailing he fell down the hill towards the bog and the coolness of the mud was like a balm to his burning body, but when he surfaced, his skin hissed and bubbled in the sunlight. He dove beneath the water again to put a stop to it, and every time he surfaced was the same. Carefully, he spread the mud of the riverbed on his head and face and arms till they were all completely covered and surfaced partway, so that only his head and upper torso were exposed. The water itself was nearly opaque with all the silt and sand he’d stirred up and kept the sunlight from reaching the rest of him. Cassidy huddled in the shade at the base of a willow nearby, shivering beneath the heat of the burns on his head and hands, so warm compared to the breezy air of the bog and the layers of muck he’d packed onto them. The rest of him was cold as a corpse and had been for some time. He slid in between the roots of the willow furthest from the sun, and recoiled from his reflection in the riverbed below - the flesh of his face that was visible puckered and pink with burns, his hair plastered thick and muddy against his skull in matted clumps beneath a dripping layer of bog water. He cut a figure the likes of which he’d seen only once before, crumpled into his shoulder with its teeth deep in his throat.
She’d made him hers, he realized. And he could never go home.