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Don’t make a noise, don’t leave the room until I come back from the dead for you. I will come back from the dead for you.
[…] Leave the lights on. Keep talking. I’ll keep walking toward the sound of your voice.
“you are jeff,” richard siken
There is a bounty hunter watching them from the corner. He is faceless and broad, equipped with an axe tall as his body. He seems carved from stone, motionless from his perch, the small stretch of a scarred arm the only indication he might be human. He is familiar in his intent somehow—like a tickling of the Light at the back of his mind. The rest of his traveling companions seem fit to ignore him—giddy with adrenaline after striking down ghouls and marauders upon the road.
They don’t seem to remember the supposed god—the shackles and locks. The clarity of the ordeal has left Damian quiet.
He remembers this wainwright—the vestal who sat up with him as he gazed out the window at the festering landscapes. The highwayman and graverobber, the two thieves looking for solace and redemption upon the open, guttering roads who offered to play cards with him despite their concealed glances of revulsion.
He also remembers beyond these small places.
There is a distant memory that tugs at him as he watches the bounty hunter watching them. A promise, he thinks as the man rises to his feet.
He moves slow—purposeful.
He expects the bounty hunter to approach their driver. The master of the wainwright has been quieter of late, his eyes haunted and distant as if he has begun to remember something he should not have. He knows the waif of a boy is older than he appears—that the shadows in his eyes are not merely haunted, but the tell-tale sign of someone willing to sacrifice a step shy of too much. At the moment, he has little complaints. The boy is a sure driver and takes care of the expenses of food and merriment with the grave countenance of someone who has done this a long time.
The bounty hunter steps past the boy though—past the rest of the wainwright’s motley adventurers.
He stops before the flagellant’s chair—the only one dipped in shadow, away from the comforts of the hearth.
The highwayman and graverobber are playing darts. The vestal inspecting her prayerbooks while sneaking glances at the two. He is aware, distantly, that he has opened himself to this group before. Beyond all odds, that they have looked at him and deemed him worthy of company—of affection. It does not feel right to know. Just like that itching memory attempting to surface as he watches the bounty hunter draw near enough to be uncomfortable from the corner of his eye.
“Not many make it here,” the bounty hunter’s voice is flat, devoid of emotion but stirs a distant warmth in the flagellant’s chest. He turns his attention from his companions. “Adventurers or tourists?”
“Neither.”
He watches the bounty hunter closely—waiting for a flinch away, for his hand to go to his weapon. He stays still in a way that would be alarming to most folk. The flagellant inclines his head. There is a joke at the back of his mind—something about height. It feels half-remembered with a strange fondness. Even this view feels familiar, as if he has looked up at this man many times before.
“Strange.”
“We have been set upon a holy calling,” the flagellant rasps. “A Light to dispel the darkness.”
The bounty hunter snorts. “Not much coin in that.”
Exasperation sets heavy in the flagellant’s bones. He should punish this man for his impunity and familiarity.
“I suppose saving innocents from themselves is not reward enough for a man of excesses?” he asks wryly. “Surely you have been told about the loneliness of greed—of how the pursuit of gold cannot fill the empty hole in your soul.”
“Something like that,” the bounty hunter drawls. Warmth, unexpectedly, settles into his words. “You are not the first holy man to berate my proclivities.”
Near the hearth, the highwayman takes the vestal by the hand—begins to lead her in a wobbly, drunken dance.
“You travel with them long?”
The flagellant considers. There is no true way to answer this question. The Light has given him insight that muddles everything around him. He knows his companions. He also knows that there are others he might have ended up in the wainwright with—each different in every half-remembered glimpse of memory. He eyes the bounty hunter.
He too is becoming more familiar the longer they sit in the dim light.
The flagellant has seen this armor—the exact cut of the owl-like helmet, the leather and scale armor. He has been to this inn before—he has watched the boy driving their carriage rip the bounty hunter’s banner from the wall. And. Perhaps further—
“Oi.”
The flagellant tilts his head towards the bounty hunter. He has seen this man’s face before—not within the creaking, cracked walls of the wainwright. They have shared warmth and rooms before, in a different time. The itch of memory returns. It was a promise.
“They are familiar beyond this day I have known them.”
The bounty hunter snorts, fondly, and shakes his head. The motion is so strangely human. “Still like riddles it seems.”
“Still?”
The bounty hunter goes still. “Like I said, holy men—”
“Show me your face.”
“No.”
A memory stretches before him—distant and fleeting like a puff of smoke or like the feeling of blood and blight peeling at his skin. “You’ve revealed your hand, bounty hunter,” the flagellant says softly. He reaches out, and the bounty hunter stays very still. Touch in this body is strange—he does not remember much before his encounter with death. There are gaps in memory that he has never tried to fill before the shackles of denial broke beneath his blighted flail.
He places his skeletal, blighted palm upon the revealed swath of skin of the bounty hunter’s arm.
He does remember what his touch does to normal people.
He had put a steadying hand upon the vestal’s shoulder once, grabbed the highwayman’s arm to stop him from touching a cursed curio in a tower—each time he has reached out and touched he is rewarded by the same reaction. Poorly veiled revulsion, unfiltered disgust, or a contorted face of pain and agony—inflicted by accident. Though, if he thinks hard enough, he thinks that his touch even before this transformation was flinched away from—reviled.
He has made humans cry from small touches and sight alone.
The bounty hunter does not flinch.
His skin is warm—sun-touched and riveted with scars. The flagellant stares up at the bounty hunter from beneath his hood, waiting. He does not flinch away; he only stares back from the shadows of his helmet. He does not know how long they stand like that—the flagellant’s grasping hand clutching this nameless man as if he were the last vestiges of peace in the world. Stranger still is how still the bounty hunter stays, how calm—how he seems to almost relax the longer the flagellant holds onto him despite how with just a slip of thought, he could be burned and corroded.
He is struck again by that impulse—the need to see this man’s face.
“You are strange,” the flagellant says, the words leaving his body as a near painful sigh. He drags his thumb along one of the bounty hunter’s scars. He feels a subtle tremor beneath his palm. “Humans,” he says quietly, and tugs the slightest bit. The bounty hunter moves with the motion, allowing himself to be drawn closer to the flagellant, “do not like being touched by that which is beyond them.”
“I’m a professional,” the bounty hunter says dryly.
He does not flinch when the flagellant holds up his other hand, places it upon his exposed flesh. The flagellant cannot explain what spell holds him to this—what incites him to put hands on a stranger in this poor excuse of an inn. He looks at the bounty hunter, wondering what trick of the mind is making him act this way.
Even in his strange, dream-like memories—those who were most fond of him did not want him to touch them even like this.
“This is not professional, bounty hunter.”
The other man hmms and places a hand over one of the flagellant’s skeletal ones. “This doesn’t seem very holy, priest.”
“That is not what I am. I am beyond that.”
The bounty hunter chuckles. “What does that make you then, a new savior?”
The flagellant growls. “You are much too familiar with a man you have just met.”
The bounty hunter, gently, takes one of the flagellant’s hands from his skin. His gloves are smooth, weathered, and warm. Familiar. It’s strange that the word keeps rising to the front of the flagellant’s mind with this man.
“You are as well,” the bounty hunter’s voice pitches low, sultry almost. “Perhaps, you are simply a lonely, touch-starved man.”
“Accosting a man of the cloth is a sin.”
“You started this,” the bounty hunter says dryly, all playful seduction evaporating. “What kind of holy man asks a contact killer to show him his face?”
The flagellant considers the bounty hunter’s words. He wishes he could see the man’s face—to try and read what the man is after. “You are the one who approached me. Why?”
The bounty hunter shifts, seemingly uncomfortable. “You seem the leader of this group.”
A lie. He knows intuitively. This man has lied to him before.
“I am offering my services to those who need an extra hand along the road,” the bounty hunter says flatly, the image of professionalism if he did not clutch one of the flagellant’s hands in his. “It is a long, lonely road filled with horrors. Sometimes a hunter at your back is the best solution to dealing with the shadowy beasts.”
“And how do we know you are not a shadowy beast, following to devour us all?”
The bounty hunter barks a harsh laugh that draws the rest of the party’s attention. The sound fills the rickety walls. The inn goes silent. The hearth light flickers.
“Suppose you don’t really.”
The flagellant stares. A myriad of thoughts roils his mind. The strangest of all being that he knows he made a promise to this man. He does not know when or how, but nothing else could explain this familiarity—the desire to reach out and touch, to follow him up to his room.
“I doubt our employer has the relics to pay you,” the flagellant says. He begins to draw his hand away—from skin and the bounty hunter’s hand. He can feel a moment of resistance. The bounty hunter clutches his hand tighter for a breath of time before unhanding him. Curious.
“I do not take typical payment.”
The flagellant would raise an eyebrow if he could.
“I’ll speak to your employer,” the bounty hunter rumbles. “No need to concern yourself.”
“A volunteer for the wainwright. You become stranger and stranger, bounty hunter.”
He snorts. “You’ve a bit longer to crack your puzzle then, Damian.”
A shock runs through the flagellant—but before he can grab the bounty hunter again, he has already turned to make his way to where the driver is hunched over his relics. An old name. A name he has not seen fit to give his companions just as they have not seen fit to give him their own.
A name plucks at the back of his mind—one heavy with meaning and emotion.
He can picture four dark walls around him. The warmth of a pot-bellied stove, the softness of expensive quilts, the thick smell of earth and cloves, and the taste of honey on his tongue. In another time, he had allowed a man—the same height and stature as the bounty hunter—to hold his face in his hands, to kiss his all too human mouth.
Damian, the name rumbles in his mind the voice the same timbre as the bounty hunter. My first and only.
He is struck with the urge to lurch from his seat—to follow the bounty hunter across the inn and demand answers. But he is staggered by the new flood of streaks of memory. There is not one that is whole, but each adds a confusing clarity to that stab of familiarity.
There was a hamlet—a hellmouth guarded jealously by a noblewoman.
But. That is not where his addled mind goes to. He goes back to those four walls—the unmasked bounty hunter. He cannot conjure the face in his mind’s eye, but he knows the voice. He stares at the bounty hunter’s back.
He was beloved.
Was.
The bounty hunter turns. He no longer moves like a human. He moves too smoothly, too purposefully. He turns his attention back to the flagellant and steps back toward him—considers the flagellant for a long moment. He asks, voice that strange flat tone again, “What do you remember?”
The flagellant can see the odd gleam of the bounty hunter’s eyes in his mask. He remembers a torrent of blood—a loud, ringing heartbeat in his ears. The first and only time the Light had failed him.
“Tardif,” the flagellant rasps, the name torn from him like a bloody confession. “Your name is Tardif.”
The bounty hunter reaches for him.
Damian reaches back.