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“Hi, Executioner. Murdered any defenseless women lately?”
Gritted teeth. “Hello, Crow. Always a pleasure.”
She tells him this: “Don’t get me wrong. Think it’s all blasphemy, I do. But this is his becoming. He’s the dread god of this world, and he’ll drag all of Yharnam into the nightmare with his song. Can you save him from this?”
Alfred doesn’t respond. His body tenses.
She tells him this: “Relax. It’s a social call. I’m not stupid. String my guts from here to high cathedral, he would, and you’d be up walking around an hour later. Something that looks like you, anyway.”
Eileen considers telling him he’s not the only one the stranger pulled from their grave, decides he doesn’t deserve it, and so instead she laughs. Not a pleasant sound, her laughter.
“Like maggots on a corpse, eh?” she mutters, looking at the walls.
“He does this when he’s eavesdropping,” Alfred explains, brushing a fruiting body from his clothes. “I don’t think he knows he’s doing it. We must get onto cobblestone. Took me a month of sabbaths to pull out all the floorboards, once. As if I haven’t anything better to do with my holidays.” There’s love in his voice.
She tells him this, mockingly, but not unkind: “No, I’m done. I get it. It’s because you love him and it has to be this way.”
He’s sitting on the bed in one of Alfred’s shirts when Alfred comes back in. He’s pretending to look at the moon.
“Was that Eileen?”
“It was indeed. Come to remind us that she wants us both dead.” Or these are the brass tacks of their little talks, according to Alfred’s reckoning.
“I like her,” he says, simply.
Alfred likes the way he looks. Collar loose, cloth all wrinkled. Familiar, imperfect. He presses his face to the scent of sweat on the nape of his neck and pulls them both to the bed. He lays on top of him, listening to him breathe. His body warm and living.
“Your hair is a mess,” says the hunter gently, finding a place for his hands.
This is human. This is right.
Alfred spends enough time with his weapons that the palms of his hands and his fingertips are rough, and they are never far from the hunter. Lamp lit low, a book in Alfred’s lap, his thumb making absent patterns on the hunter’s shoulder. The hunter leaning into him in silence. He’s in the habit of watching his hands, Alfred long ago noticed. It seems like gratitude rather than discomfort. There hasn’t been much tenderness in his life.
Like most lovers they sense more than they speak. Tonight the hunter feels distant. In a thoughtful way. Benign. All the same it fills Alfred with a dread he cannot name.
“He deserves the chance to make a life here with me. To be a human being for a while. He’s never had that, not once. You don’t know what they’ve done to him.”
She tells him this: “All the same, the harvest is past, childhood is over, and he is what he became.”
The authority she says this with infuriates him.
“He’s hurting no one. He’s never been tempted. He’s never - ”
“ - He’s changing the city just by being in it. Lightening can’t travel through a body without burning its host. And how do you know what he’s thinking? A wall here, a door there. That’s how it’s begun. You know why the gods have tombs, Executioner? They drive themselves into the dark places, into the mud. They hollow themselves. All this out of love.”
“What do you want?” he roars, finally, and against the wall of her silence he immediately feels foolish and weak.
“Let him go. You have to. You’re holding him back.”
Alfred turns and presses a kiss to the soft cold plane of his cheek.
“Where’s my sweet boy?” he whispers. The hunter smiles, compulsively. He cups Alfred’s neck.
Warmth.
The hunter kisses him, light and delicate, almost shy. A nip to the rim of his lips. He’s teasing him. Alfred feels something course through him, hungrier than yearning but not ugly, not desperate. He makes a sound in the back of his throat and catches the hunter’s face in his hands, leads him to linger there instead of pulling away. The hunter opens his lips to his, the sweet cool wetness of his mouth, and starts undoing the buttons on his shirt.
Alfred’s almost sick with it, the love he feels, the desire, and a minute later he’s saying all kinds of things to him:
“Closer,” Alfred whispers. “Come closer. Come to me.” They’re as close as two bodies can be. On a night like this it’s never enough.
But the hunter loses all his reservations and pulls him down into his heat. And Alfred feels his spine split into stars beneath his hand.
Something was coming. A dull shock wave. A singular throb. The cobblestones shivered. Something metal above him rattled. Then silence. Silence.
He was on his back. Outside. He felt the cold stone through all his layers of clothing before he sensed anything else.
And then he knew it, gliding, a beam of intention, pure as light, and with it, a cloudless rage that terrified him, excited him -
And someone pulled the knife out of his stomach. He felt air on his guts. A flash of pain, dull and small, like a blown-out match. And then, nothing.
From nowhere, a voice.
- Don’t do that again.
Alfred stirred, coughed. Dried blood in his mouth. Down the back of his throat. He was terribly thirsty. “What are you?” he whispered.
He opened his eyes.
And for a moment he sees himself the way the hunter sees him, his thin handsome features and his pale, manic eyes; and along it comes a tidal wave of relief and a love like water, dark and swelling -
Alfred’s reeling back from him, collapsing against the wall, panting. There’s a strange tingling in the back of his head.
“What on earth - ? Why would you do that?”
“I’m sorry. I just wanted you to …I didn’t hurt you, did I?”
Alfred stares at him in the dark. His eyes reflect light now. Not strongly. Alfred’s not sure why. Human beings don’t have tapeta lucida. Maybe the hunter simply forgot.
The hunter threads his fingers through Alfred’s, and Alfred brings his wrist to his chilly lips. He’s still dizzy. No, he’s fine. Everything is fine.
“It’s all right,” he tells him. He holds his hand, tight.
He lays there in silence for a while, remembering.
The hunter asked him where he lived, told him he’d take him home. Everything now in sharp relief, oh god he was going to have to live. He wanted to panic, was too tired to panic. What was he going to do for the next hour? What was he going to do for the rest of his life?
The hunter stripped off their bloody clothes and lay with him in silence. Alfred held himself tight to him. He didn’t know what else to do.
The hunter stroked Alfred’s back. Gently. No insinuation. All the same. Alfred reached for his prayers, moreover, for the way he felt when he said them -
- and slammed up against a wall of pain and fear and self-disgust. The Queen is ruined; his master, gone. It’s done. It’s done.
How dare he live through this.
There was no reason for him to say no anymore. He didn’t deserve the reasons he once had. So turned his face up, angled his lower body towards his, and let the hunter kiss him. Let his hand push open his legs.
Then it all went away for a while. Much to his surprise.
and god they are like children they know no pain, they are nothing beyond his sweet voice, his breathless laughter, his nose getting in the way when they kiss
(In the morning: the hunter wasn’t there. Alfred padded barefoot into the kitchen. Water all over the floor. The hunter’s scrubbing Alfred’s garb against a washboard, in a basin. Soap bubbles, tainted pink.
The hunter’s face turned red when Alfred noticed him. As if they hadn’t seen each other stark naked.
“Thought I’d clean this for you,” he muttered. “I knew you were tired of looking at it.”
“That basin’s too shallow for that. If you want to use it, take it outside,” Alfred told him, voice thick with sleep. “So you don’t get water everywhere.” He added, “It’s all right.”
“Oh,” he said, quietly, picked up the basin and disappeared into the street.
“Wait,” Alfred called after him, but softly. “Come back. Not yet.” He wasn’t ready for the light of day, for human voices. And Alfred loved him, then. He wanted him near.)
That was how they passed the time, in those fragile early days. His mind would fly to these places. The fear and the dark. The hunter would call him back with his body and hands. He kept him alive and he kept him sane. Or at least, what they did together let him forget.
A few nights of grotesque indulgence and the story came out piece by piece.
“I killed the gods,” he whispered, late at night, sweat on their shoulders, legs entwined. “I killed them all.”
And with the absence of purposes comes fear. The fear of sickness and boredom and death. Nothing left to him now but the slow sliding decay all the other hunters warn you about, the one his master had placed him so far above. It had once been easy to avoid the beast. Place your feet on the path, raise your sword, blind your eyes in the light and die on the road to the sun. Go to death like unto a lover, smiling and quick. And it’ll never catch up to you. Never.
His master’s words: You are holy. Be brave.
He and the hunter argue about it, sometimes. He’d give him all the tired platitudes that Alfred was warned against by the church - I want you to be your own person. I want you to live your life and find out what you want … But why trust a man’s desires, pathetic and squirming, as ephemeral as dust? None of this can compare to the glory of his Lord.
That’s why I’m not doing anything. I don’t want to be a god. I just want to be here with you.
He wants to be here with him too. He is all he knows he wants.
And so here the executioner lays, in his tainted bed, sucking impure blood, commiserating with this thing (and all the years ahead of him, all the rest of his life, there are decades and decades and decades)
He can’t feel his master’s hand anymore.
“It would have been so perfect,” Alfred whispers to himself, in the dark.
The hunter understands.
“Open your mouth,” he tells him. He nicks his small finger against his eyetooth, to the side, so that it won’t influence his grip. (Alfred can’t help but notice. All these little things that once added up to make him a killer. What is he now? Just his lover? Can he keep him here, just the way he is, the way he himself keeps Alfred? Or will he descend into the godless earth, or else rise like a banner in the night? Will he have to be a god to him, someday? You’re like the sun, he told Alfred once, and in his voice is real grief. I don’t know how to love the way you love. I don’t have that shining faith.)
“You don’t have to,” Alfred tells him.
“I want you happy.”
He touches his finger to Alfred’s lips and Alfred parts them obediently, lets a few drops of blood blossom in his mouth. He takes in a shuddering breath, lets euphoria spill out into his body, heavy as sin.
It all goes away, and he loves him. He’s free to love him. No sorrow, no guilt, no pain.
“Tell me how to make you happy,” the hunter whispers.
“Let me be me for a while,” he murmurs, half-awake. “Let me. Please.”
He isn’t sure what he means, but the hunter knows. Whatever he takes it from - creates a dream from whole cloth, an educated guess and empathy; dives deep enough inside of him to pull out his memories - he gives him what he needs. The scent of incense, a mote of dust, voices in prayer, ineffable light.