Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Each time he escaped the city, skinned knees and shivering from the cold, it was always the Torchbearer who bandaged him up and gave him his first meal by the fire. Their own quiet ritual. But now Clancy eats alone.

When he’s choked down as much of his food as he can manage - never enough to fill the hole in his stomach but at least enough that he doesn’t get worried glances - Clancy rises from his spot and makes the long walk, accompanied by guards, to his lonely tent. Prepared for him, kept apart from all the others. As though they are quarantining him. As though what’s wrong with him is somehow contagious.

He’d like to tell them that he doesn’t think a slow transformation into a Bishop is catching. It’s a matter of purposeful overcompensation. A slow descent into acceptance.

On that first night, after his lengthy interrogation by Luna, Clancy was led to this same tent and “encouraged” to remain inside. They don’t call him a prisoner, but the title is implied. His new quarters looked much the same then as it does now.

A single cot in the corner with an old blanket draped across it. A small stool and wooden desk equipped with paper and pencils, a box of stubby wax candles, and a basin of water. Pressed flowers, dried and faded but still a comforting touch of color, are stitched to the fabric along one side of the tent’s beige canvas.

The oddest addition to his spare new living quarters, though, is a gleaming ukulele, which sat patiently waiting on him to arrive. Wood polished and newly strung. The fresh face of a friend he hasn’t seen in a very long time.

Clancy takes it now from where it typically rests on the foot of his cot and draws it into his lap. He doesn’t have to wonder who placed it here for him. Who made sure he had paper and pencils, and candlelight to write by. Who collected the flowers or ensured him a place in the bandito camp in the first place.

But he doesn’t see much of the Torchbearer these days.

The instrument is beautiful. Not his well-beloved and well-worn one from inside the city. If Clancy had to guess, he would assume that it’s currently collecting dust in his room within Dema, if the Bishops haven’t already cleared it out for use by another citizen. Locked all his treasured items away in some vault within their Towers.

But this one is slightly larger, the sound deeper and richer. Clancy can’t begin to guess how Torch acquired it, but he’s grateful regardless. Having his music back is a small but invaluable comfort. A straight line of sanity to follow with careful footsteps placed one in front of the other, to which he devotes most of his free time.

When he’s allowed it.

“You seem to be in a better mood today,” Luna comments as she enters the tent, carrying a small wooden box, which she sets next to him.

He doesn’t bother to stop his playing. Or reply. And he definitely doesn’t turn his gaze to the box. He and Luna have formed a contentious truce, one that is comfortable for neither involved but is required by their relation to an absentee third party. It’s an exhausting circling, circling on the mat. Where neither he or Luna can make the first move.

They’re simply stuck with each other.

“They tell me you didn’t try to escape once today.” Luna snags the stool from beside Clancy’s desk and seats herself on it, hands propped on either side of her hips and leaning forward a bit. “Working on a new song?”

Clancy pauses a moment before resuming his playing, but Luna seems willing to be patient with him today. Tolerance of one another is key. He only stops again to make a note on his paper, changing up one of the chord progressions. Certain that if he can get this right, it’ll stop that awful itch in his skull. Then he tucks the pencil behind his ear.

His hair is shaved down to his scalp now. But cutting ties carries a different connotation. It’s not the city he feels cut off from. Not even the city that he’s fleeing from anymore. He’s in a race to stay ahead of the storm washing in off the coast. And he misses the sweep and pull of the tide.

“Don’t you want to open your gift?” Luna asks after a while and tips her head towards the box. “Courtesy of the bandito council.”

Clancy’s hands finally go still on the instrument, and his eyes do wander slowly to the box. He doesn’t think that he wants what he will find inside.

“So, I guess this means you don’t plan to kill me?”

Luna sits back slightly at that. “I’m sorry that our introduction had to be so… blunt.” She crosses her arms over her chest then, her passive expression going tense at the edges. “Certain concerned parties wanted to be sure you wouldn’t crack under pressure, and they thought I’d be the best person to apply that pressure. Under the circumstances.”

Clancy swallows, eyes blank at the memory of that night. “You can just say it.”

Luna purses her lips a moment. There’s little reason for her to conceal the truth if Clancy already knows it. “Alright, I prefer being frank anyway. Truth is, everyone is afraid of you. Of what you can do. I mean, you must have known that there would be some opposition when you returned to Trench.”

One of Clancy’s eyebrows raises, and it’s the only sign that he shows any real interest in what Luna has to say. “Everyone?”

“He’s due back any time now,” Luna says, knowing the question beneath the question that Clancy asks.

“They were supposed to be back two days ago,” Clancy grumbles and sets the instrument aside. He doesn’t yet pick up the box. But he does manage to raise his gaze to Luna’s, searching her face for some sign that she’s as worried as he is.

But Luna doesn’t give him that. In fact, since her sister disappeared, she’s been more difficult to read than ever. Based on the way Torch was willing to comply to her every demand, though, Clancy would certainly assume there’s a connection there. A strong one.

He knows that Torch doesn’t give his loyalty lightly.

“Delays happen,” Luna assures him, but he wished that she sounded a little more certain of the fact herself. They both know what a prize the Torchbearer would be to capture. Especially now.

“In the meantime, the rest of us have work to do.”

Clancy reluctantly picks up the box and flips open the carved lid. The antlers are laid delicately inside. Taken from him the night he arrived, Clancy had almost hoped he would never see them again. Like waking up from a bad dream.

No blood on his hands, after all.

“I take it you want me to use them,” he mutters. His hand hovers over them, unwilling to move the last few inches to reach in and take what’s rightfully his.

Luna takes a slow breath before leaning forward to rest her arms across her knees. “Clancy, the path you choose is your own. The council have elected to let you dig your own grave, so to speak. But if you want my advice?”

She holds his gaze hostage, and he searches hers carefully in turn. “Whatever you choose to do with those, don’t let them define you. Not to the citizens, and not to the banditos either. They’re not who you are.”

Clancy’s smirk is as sharp as each point of the antlers. “Are you telling me to improve my image? Really?” He swipes the pad of his thumb along his bottom lip. “Because that’s exactly what the Bishops wanted from me when I had to sing for them.”

Something like anger flickers across Luna’s features, turning them a shade darker. “Was that before or after Nico used you as his personal meat suit, I wonder? Don’t compare me and mine to the Bishops if you want to go on breathing free air, Clancy. There’s other ways I could deal with this issue. Be grateful I’ve chosen this one.”

“You’re not a very nice person, are you,” Clancy laughs dryly.

She bares her teeth in a smile, savage and unkind.

“I’d like to see you try to keep two dozen people alive while they’re all hell bent on sneaking in and out of a city ruled by soulless dictators intent on killing us all.” She shrugs her shoulders sarcastically. “Tends to wear on the nerves a bit. And you’re not exactly a ray of sunshine either, you know.”

“That would be largely thanks to the meat suit thing you mentioned earlier,” he spits back, but now his anger is directed less at her and more at the world in general, which does take a weight off his chest. And the edge off this conversation.

He reaches into the box and takes out the antlers carefully, as though one false move might cause them to spark and set the whole world on fire. With the feel of them against his skin again, his stomach churns painfully. Rubbing salt into fresh wounds.

“Can I ask you something?” he whispers, voice fragile.

Luna nods, leaning her chin onto one fist.

Clancy sighs and twists one of the antlers around in his fingers as though examining it from all angles. As if he doesn’t have them memorized already. “You let me leave that tent alive on the first night, but I haven’t figured out why yet. Why trust me?”

Silence hangs uncomfortably between them for a while. Of all the people that Clancy has ever met, the Torchbearer is the easiest to withstand extended silence with. Luna might be the most difficult. She makes him squirm, those calculating eyes of hers summing him up. Breaking him down to his component parts.

She doesn’t seem to care for whatever she finds inside.

After a while, Luna gets to her feet and replaces the stool where she found it. Clancy thinks she will leave without answering him, but with her back turned to him, she pushes her hands through her hair with a sigh and says, softly, “I don’t trust you, Clancy. But I trust Torch, and he asked me to help save you. So, that’s what I did.”

She pulls unhappily at the gloves she wears. “I know there’s been trouble in paradise between the two of you since you returned to Trench, but trust me, everything he does is to protect you.”

Clancy smiles grimly. “Funny. You trust Torch, and honestly, so do I, despite everything.” He looks up at her where she stands near the tent entrance, and he wonders, not for the first time, what exactly she sees when she looks at him: an ally or a threat or something worse. “But the only thing I don’t trust his judgement on is his opinion of me.”

Luna gives a tired smile. “Somehow he still sees the best in people, I don’t understand it. But he would do anything to keep you alive, and I think that includes keeping you honest.”

“Pity he’s not here now,” Clancy observes, shifting the antlers in his hands and thinking of Dema and a dozen worried faces all looking up at him. Pinned behind a pulpit by the unblinking eye of a spotlight.

Luna doesn’t say anything to that. She doesn’t seem to know what to say, so she leaves him to his own devices. Wicked as they may be.

Waking up dead never gets easier.

But this time, at least, there’s someone waiting on him.

Warm hands drape a blanket around cold shoulders, and there’s already tears on his cheeks because he’s still so ashamed each time. He’s a parasite. And the choking sensation in the back of his throat takes a while to ebb. But the soothing voice in his ear reminds him he has a job to do. That’s what matters. Not the scorched state of his soul.

“I’ve got the clothes you asked for,” Sol whispers softly. Her own nurse’s scrubs smell sharply of the chemicals used to clean and prepare the bodies of the recently glorified. And it’s hard to think she’s the same person he once knew.

Her brief escape into Trench has transformed her, as it does to everyone it can sink its claws into, or so he’s beginning to learn.

Her eyes have a fiercer light to them now, though all around them is the gray bruise of sleepless nights. And sometimes when she’s tired and frustrated, her hands never stop their shaking.

When she hands over the clothes, he sees her fingers are still somewhat stained, the dregs of ink that have yet to wash away. And he wonders just how many hands he's going to stain and make complicit in this madness before he's done.

“And this is from one of your recent followers, a gift,” Sol pulls something from her pocket, a roll of fabric almost like ribbon but heavier. “She hoped you’d like it.”

Foreign hands reach out at his willing. Pliable to his whims. They feel wrong, the skin too tight, the callouses in all the wrong places. The fabric grates against his fingers, and he has to fight the urge to drop it on instinct.

What he holds now is a long black stole with his name embroidered into it, over and over so that the letters’ shape lose all meaning. They have become nothing but a pattern of something sacred.

The room they’re hidden in is lit by a single, red bulb, screwed into the wall. They’re in some dark place beneath the city, utilitarian and inhospitable. Like a bomb shelter. Clancy doesn’t ask; he doesn’t need to know.

And Sol turns away, giving what little privacy the cramped room can afford, as he rises from the cold, metal table to pull on the clothes that she’s brought for him.

“Were you able to get it- the other thing I asked for?”

Sol is quiet for a while. “Are you sure, Clancy? I’m not sure it would help you.”

“I need to know,” he insists. So that he can try to live with himself, after.

In the end, she slides the file onto the table. The photo pinned to the front is black and white, the name written out in careful hand. It’s not a very thick file, all the days of a stolen life summed up in a few slips of paper. At least now he’ll know who it is whose eternal rest he’s disrupted.

“How is everyone?” Sol asks after a while, once Clancy has dressed his vessel.

He tries not to think the word “victim” but that seems equally appropriate.

“Luna is alright,” he tells her, knowing that’s what she most wants to hear. The voice that comes from his mouth is strange to his ears, though, and he thinks to clear his throat, as though that would make a difference. “Pretty sure she hates me, though.”

Sol tears a strip from the roll of red tape she brought along. She doesn’t question that he asked her for red, but he sees the strain at the corners of her eyes all the same. “You know, I think the trouble is that you two are too similar.”

She places one strip of tape on his left shoulder, then tears another. “You’re both… abrasive people. But you care very deeply, even if you don’t always know how to express it.”

“That’s one way of putting it,” Clancy almost laughs, but he doesn’t like the way that sounds either. And it feels all too wrong to laugh using this voice, to smile using this mouth. A sickly betrayal, one he knows well. He’s been this thing on both sides, and he hates to be the one pulling the strings now.

He’s going to spiral again into a torrent of self-doubt and hatred when Sol brushes a hand across his shoulder blades. Soothing circles that cause his breathing to slow.

“You didn’t mention Torch. How is he?”

But Clancy just shakes his head. He reaches for the mask and pulls it on, smooths it into place with the palms of his hands, pressed down over his ears. The familiar cover that it offers to him is enough of a comfort for now.

Sol grabs him by the hand to pull him up from where he sits on the edge of the table.

“They’re all waiting to see you,” she says once she’s sure that he can stand steady on his feet. Sometimes his sense of balance is disturbed by the seizing. “Are you ready?”

Clancy swallows as he drapes the stole around his neck and tucks it beneath his jacket. He needs a few more steadying breaths, in and out through these unfamiliar lungs. Before he can go. Before he can look them all in the eye. Before he can play at being a thing they can place their faith inside.

The air here is stale with death and dust, so far from the reach of the sun, beneath the city streets he used to walk. He can taste it on his tongue. He can feel the pull to run and hide, burrowing down into the rabbit’s darkened den. But he’s so tired of being prey.

Dressed in the guise of a Bishop, he can pretend to be the predator for a little while at least.

“I’m ready,” he says. And he lets her lead him to his expectant congregation.

He can’t bring himself to eat for a while after a seizing. The whole disgusting process rots away any appetite he might have. It’ll be a while and a cold bath or two in a mountain stream before he feels truly clean. And even then. The sickness goes deep.

But he likes to be near the fire in the evenings, even though that means enduring the sideways glances. The rest of the banditos in this camp rotate out frequently, always coming and going. Clancy never learns their names, rarely even their faces. Because he knows they won’t be here long. But their purpose is all the same: to keep him right where he belongs.

The fireside, though, is the closest thing he knows to home these days. Chasing away the memories of the black grit of the grave.

“Hey, we’ve got movement west of camp!”

The call gets everyone onto their feet at once, and Clancy barely has a chance to peer in the direction they’re all moving before he’s flanked by banditos ready to spirit him away at a moment’s notice. He wants to tear his way through them, show the wildness lying in wait underneath.

In fact, he almost does. Bloody impulse bright behind his eyes. But he manages to drown it out for now. Not because he’s all that intent to remain on his best behavior.

But because it’s Torch, he’s back; it has to be him.

Luna skirts past in a blur of yellow bands and lanterns raised against the black that presses in against their camp. And the first of the returning group to break the security’s lines doubles over, breathing hard.

“Found some escapees. We’ve got injured. They need help.”

Clancy jumps forward a step before they can stop him, but there’s plenty of hands ready to snatch and pull him back. Panic bolts sharp through him. He watches helpless, breathless as a few more banditos break away from the rest of the pack to head off into the dark.

Moments later, they carry them in, two injured banditos and a pair of half-starved Dema citizens still in their tattered gray jumpsuits. Clancy catches snapshots of them from between the moving silhouettes. All gathered around to witness the return of their own, the arrival of those freshly escaped.

Torch is the last to arrive.

He’s almost immediately surrounded, and Clancy observes quietly as he’s hounded with questions, tugged at by various hands. All of them eager to see him, many offering food or drinks or just words of comfort. It’s interesting, to see the Torchbearer at work, tucked behind his mask yet always on display. The way everyone around him is drawn in by the mystery, by the genuineness. He’s so clearly exhausted, but his eyes are still smiling.

When Luna finally chases them all off, to give him a moment of peace, the camp seems to relax in a way that it hasn’t truly since he left. Like they’ve all taken a collective breath and now their worries are eased. And when Clancy slips away, no one seems to think anything of it.

He follows the Torchbearer between the tents, feeling like a lost dog.

“Torch-” is all he can manage before he realizes that, despite his ample time to prepare, he has no idea what he wants to say.

The figure before him only pauses his weary gait, shoulders slumped and hood drawn up. He doesn’t turn. Doesn’t acknowledge. Clancy is looking right at him, and yet they feel a continent apart again.

He presses his clenched fists against his stomach. “Please just- talk to me.”

Torch turns then, almost braced, one arm crossed over his chest, the sleeve of his hoodie bunched in his fingers. His eyes linger somewhere near Clancy’s boots. “I thought I’d be the last person you want to talk to.”

Clancy wants to reach out and grab him. He wants to be back on the island. He wants to be somewhere they’ve never been before, where none of this matters and nothing bad ever happened. But they’re stuck here, with the choices that they’ve made. And it’s killing him before Nico even gets a chance.

“I don’t care, I don’t care- Just-” Clancy storms across the space between them and grabs the Torchbearer by the arm. “Just take off the damn mask and look at me!”

His insistence startles them both. Torch raises one hand and tugs the yellow bandana down from his face. A worried crease between his brows. “I thought you’d be angry. I lied-”

Clancy fists the sleeve of Torch’s hoodie and grinds his teeth together. “I am. I am going to be so angry when I can manage that, but right now, I don’t have- I don’t have room, okay? I don’t have space to be angry. I’m just-”

Petrified.

But he swallows down the feeling with all his might.

“I just want someone to look at me like I’m not going to die soon.” He shivers, caught somewhere between that rage and terror and not knowing the way out, and the only person he’s ever known who’s able to lead him is avoiding him out of his own sense of guilt.

But something in Torch’s defenses is so incapable of guarding against Clancy’s pain, and it doesn’t matter. He’s going to drag him into an embrace. He’s going to whisper promises, that he’s going to make it. That they both will.

He’s going to do it as many times as it takes for them both to believe it, and Clancy sinks into the relief of it. Again and again, content to drown.

Chapter Text

Fire in his head and blood in his mouth, the Torchbearer scrambles back from the outstretched hands of the glorious gone.

“Get them out of here!” he roars back over one shoulder and watches his banditos tearing up the slope above him.

They’re dragging the Dema escapees behind them, desperate hands and bloody knees. Bait to catch the monster that haunts the Bishops’ dreams. But this demon doesn’t shy away from a trap just because he knows it to be one.

When he sees them hesitating on that height, waiting for him, Torch shouts for them to keep moving before he takes off further down the slope in hopes of leading the danger away. They know better than to delay. Even for him. Especially for him.

These vessels are worn thin, so far out from their city, their tomb. Coming apart at the seams, the threat of their touch is psychological as well as physical. He doesn’t want to know what rotten flesh feels like wrapped around his throat. Doesn’t want to imagine a drag path back to Dema in their putrid company.

And if he’s honest - which he so rarely is these days - he half-way loves the thrill of the chase. The hate in their golden eyes, as he slips just out of their reach. Graceful thing that he’s become moving through the wildest parts of the world.

He wants them to chase him, wants them to realize he’s escaped them again and know that they’ve failed and they always will. Because every horrible thing they have ever done has crafted this thing meant to end them. He is their unruly creation as much as Clancy. Two weapons meant to be aimed at one another, now turned on their creators instead.

He is their retribution, the payment coming due, and he wants them to know it, every moment. Their rage, hurled from the lungs to which they once denied breath, is just the fuel to the fire that’s going to consume them some day. He’ll see to it himself, whatever it takes.

They won’t catch him. He’s been outrunning his demons for years.

The only person he’s ever allowed to catch him in all these years is another kind of monster entirely. Torch can picture the sharp edges and slopes of Clancy’s skull beneath his face, as starkly as though it were painted onto his skin. He’s every macabre thing that Torch has ever wanted to tear out of this world. The one Bishop that managed to get inside his defenses and claim his loyalty.

Because Clancy is also home to him. He’s that crooked smile and those wickedly clever eyes. He’s music echoing off cavern walls and sunlight boring white holes into saltwater waves. He’s a stubborn will. A selfish, bleeding heart. He is, somewhere underneath, that sixteen year-old kid in need of saving.

He is a weapon that could destroy the Torchbearer completely, and Torch welcomes him in. He knows it’s a mutually assured destruction. In the days since their return to Trench, he has missed Clancy like a punctured lung.

“Are you hurt?” Clancy asks, drawing back from Torch’s arms to see the crust of dried blood beneath his nose. “What happened?”

“Oh,” Torch says, only just remembering his narrow escape. He wipes again at the blood on his lip. “One of them caught me with an elbow. Don’t think it’s broken, but I didn’t exactly have time to check.”

Clancy’s eyes spark with fury again. “Them? The escapees?” He turns his head like he wants to find the one responsible, but Torch just laughs, breathy and raw.

He’s too tired - and too relieved - to do much else. “No, not them, the zombies. Would you really go fist-fight a recent escapee for me? That’s sweet.”

But Clancy doesn’t take his bid for their usual banter. His attention, razor-sharp as ever, hooks into the first thing Torch said. “Zombies? You ran into glorious gone?” His hold on the Torchbearer’s sleeve tightens. “This far out?”

“Clancy,” Torch breathes his name. His head is a heavy thing now, weary from the long journey home. “You’ll have to get in line if you want the full story. Right now I just want to sleep-”

It’s been days since he’s caught more than a few hours of rest at a time, and even those were spent in the form of a ghostly projection, wandering over Trench in search of more escaped citizens. But it’s starting to get to him, the broken shutter slamming in the wind of his thoughts.

“Right,” Clancy says and releases him. He steps back, head down, hands twisting, picking at dried skin. When he starts to turn away, Torch feels the loss so acutely he has to catch his breath.

Clancy is his lifeline. His hangman’s noose.

“We’ll talk tomorrow,” Torch offers, already prepared for the rejection on Clancy’s tongue, but there’s none there.

His nervous hands never slow their frantic motions, though. Whispering, “You know where I’ll be,” Clancy leaves him.

Not for the first time, Torch’s rage is tested by the narrow line he is required to walk. Listening for any unwanted eavesdroppers on their conversation, he fears what the other banditos would think of the way he yields so easily to Clancy. He should be on his guard, as they are. He should be doing everything in his power to ensure that Clancy doesn’t do more harm than good.

Contain the inevitable damage, so to speak.

Torch has spent his entire life handling fire. He should know better than to think something so dangerous could ever be trusted. It’s a destructive force. Not malicious in nature, only fulfilling its purpose. Just like Clancy.

But broken as he is, twisted and uncanny, Torch wants to show his people that Clancy’s heart is still intact.

It won’t happen overnight, though, and certainly not when he’s swaying from exhaustion. So once Clancy is out of sight, and hopefully not being watched by any banditos, Torch slips from their hiding place. When he does find his way to his own cot, his fears chase him into sleep, and all his dreams are of pacing the shores of Voldsoy, staring down a furious storm in the distance.

“Get up, we’re moving the camp.”

Clancy startles awake as a pile of clothes hit his shoulder. Bandito green and yellow. He peers around his private tent to see the Torchbearer, arms crossed, waiting on him to move.

Clancy can still taste the dust from Dema as he pushes himself up from his pillow. “What? Why?”

Torch’s mask is pulled up again, his voice equally cloaked in this abrasive new detachment. Clancy has to swallow his disappointment.

“Those goners we saw, it’s fair to guess there will be vultures in the sky soon, and we want to be on the move by the time they get here.”

When Clancy reaches down to inspect the clothes he’s been given, Torch explains. “If they spot you, we’re as good as dead. So put them on and meet me at the edge of camp with whatever you can carry. Our team is moving out as soon as you’re ready.”

And just as quickly as he came, he’s gone again. Leaving Clancy reeling. Mechanically, he rises and dresses himself, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and shoves what he can into the olive green duffel he’s been given to store his personal items in. The ukulele he tucks beneath his new coat - he refuses to leave it behind no matter how unruly it will be to travel with.

On the way out of his tent, Luna snags him by the front of his coat. She motions off the banditos that have been tasked with guarding him, and the moment they’re out of earshot, she starts rattling off orders.

“Stay with Torch, okay? Don’t do anything stupid. If you get my banditos killed or captured, I assure you, Nico will be the least of your worries. When you get to where you’re going, I want you to make another appearance in Dema, and this time, you’re going to make it loud.”

She raises a hand when he opens his mouth to object.

“Look, I know, okay? But trust me, we need them to know we’re not scared right now. Just because we’re on the move doesn’t mean we have to be on the run. I trust you can handle that, hm?”

Clancy blinks at her. “I might have an idea or two.”

Luna nods. “Yeah, I had a feeling.” Then, just when Clancy thinks she might release him, she looks him over, sighs, and buttons up the front of his jacket. “And take care of that idiot, will you?”

She pointedly shifts her gaze to where the Torchbearer is waiting with a small group of banditos, all of whom are geared up to travel light and fast.

Clancy swipes a nervous hand over his face. “He’s not ever going to be safe with me, and you know that. Why not send me with someone else?”

But Luna just straightens his collar and shakes her head. “He’d only be more dangerous if he’s worried about you. At least this way you two can keep an eye on each other. Now go on.”

Clancy shrinks back from her, annoyed by her observations and by how little he’s able to disagree with them. Whatever they are now, he and the Torchbearer are more dangerous apart than when they’re together.

He also doesn’t like the idea of appearing in Dema again so soon after his last seizing, especially not at the beck and call of the banditos. He doubts Sol will have had time to find him a proper vessel. The thought sends shivers down his spine.

When he joins the rest of his group, he’s given an arm’s length of distance from every bandito and none of them meet his eye. Whether it’s by Torch’s orders or their own sense of self-preservation, Clancy feels his skin begin to crawl.

“Come on,” Torch says, rallying their attention away from Clancy. “Eyes up, let’s move fast.”

Hours later, when Torch finally gives them a moment of respite from their break-neck pace, Clancy doubles over on a large rock by the river. Head between his knees, fingers intertwined on the back of his scalp. The water races past, swollen with spring rains and snow melt; it’s a deafening roar further downstream where there is a short falls driving down onto jagged rocks. The noise itself is soothing.

It matches the inside of his skull.

“How are you holding up?” a voice asks from behind him, and there’s a cool rag draped across the back of his neck with gentle fingers. Little comforts.

Clancy looks up to the see the Torchbearer drop to one knee at his side. He puts a hand to the rag, almost in surprise, then moves it across his neck. The breeze that lifts the desiccated leaf litter from the ground also cools his skin. He sighs softly. Grateful for this small display of kindness.

“I’m fine,” he says, eyes closed. Tilting his head back, he stretches out the muscles in his neck and shoulders. Hears the crack of tired bones. “Shouldn’t you be checking in with your people?”

The other banditos aren’t far. Always within sight but at a healthy distance, they’ve gathered up and laid out on some of the larger, flat rocks by the riverside in the balmy sunlight. Clancy always forgets that most of them are just kids, and it’s not until he watches two of them wrestling, King of the Mountain style, that he realizes they’re probably no older than he was on his first escape attempt.

“They’re used to this sort of thing,” Torch mutters, clearly dissatisfied with that thought. “It would be nice to be able to give them some stability, you know?”

Added pressure on the already fissured foundation of Clancy’s sense of self-control. He moves the cool rag to his forehead then, covering his eyes. “What are they going to think? You sitting here talking to me like this.”

“Clancy-” He’s scolding, softly, a familiar annoyance, but one they’ve both felt the absence of, a missing rib. “Quit dodging the conversation and ask me what you really want to know.”

Raising his head again, Clancy looks past Torch’s shoulder to the slow rise of woods leaning over them in wait. “You don’t owe me an explanation.”

Torch shifts from kneeling to sit next to Clancy on the mossy rock, shoulder nudging Clancy’s back even with his chin tucked to one side so that he’s facing away. “Ask me anyway.”

Clancy runs the rag over his face once then twists it between his fingers. “Was anything on Voldsoy real?” The question comes already shattered into pieces from rattling so long inside his chest. It cuts his tongue on the way out. Leaving blood in his teeth.

Torch takes a slow breath in and tugs the mask down from his face. Then, as if that is not enough, he slips the bandana off over his head so that it sends his dark curls in all directions. He folds the yellow cloth. Presses it flat between his palms.

“I don’t understand all of what I do, how it works or why, but I was there with you. As much as I could be, I was there. It was real.”

Even with his back to him, Clancy can sense Torch’s posture. As sure as he knows the feel of sunlight falling from the east or the motion of filtered air in his room in Dema, he knows the way Torch moves when he’s nervous. When he’s hurt.

Clancy bites down on the inside of his cheek, worrying the flesh between his teeth. “When did this happen to you? When did you-” He doesn’t know how to finish the question. What to call this - this transformation.

Torch leans his chin onto one fist, but when that doesn’t feel right, he slides his jaw along his knuckles until he’s pressed his forehead down on them instead. “Around the time I lost you, the first time. It was after that I started dreaming of walking through Dema. And once I found you while you were in the Towers, but I couldn’t- I couldn’t make you see me.”

“Oh.”

Clancy rocks back, his lungs fighting for air. Fighting the urge to run. “That long.” Years, he thinks. “You’ve been hiding this for years.”

“Hiding,” Torch says, like the word is painful in his mouth. “I never meant to hide it, but there were always more important things. And every time I got you back, you were hurting and scared and always gone again so quickly. There was never the time or the space. It was just this horror of knowing, no matter what I did, Nico would always find you. When was I supposed to-”

“We were on Voldsoy for months,” Clancy counters, and the anger is buzzing in his skin, TV static crawling up and down his spine, clotting in his throat. He finds it hard to sit still, hands without any hair to worry at choose the broken skin around his fingernails instead.

“You had months to tell me the truth.”

Torch takes a breath that sounds so labored Clancy almost turns on instinct to make sure he’s not actually hurt. But then he’s silent. Just that jagged inhale and nothing else to show for it. Torch drops his head. Breathes out and out and out.

“I was scared of what you’d do if you knew,” he admits, heavy with shame but not regret. There’s a resolve that buoys his words. “You were so fragile afterwards. If you could’ve just seen the way you looked that day, like one more thing would end you. Break you completely. I couldn’t be that, do that to you.”

Fragile. Breakable. Nothing but an object to be handled with extreme caution.

Clancy frowns down at his shaking hands, objects of violence that don’t feel like they truly belong to him anymore. “So, I really am just a burden you’re forced to carry around. Careful you don’t drop me, or I’ll fall to pieces, right?”

“It’s not like that-” Torch argues, thin and dry as the dead leaves beneath their boots.

“But it sure sounds like it. All I’ve ever done is make you chase me down again and again.” Clancy bites down on the back of his hand, stifling whatever else he wants to say. He shuts his eyes. Feels the spiral deep inside. Falling, falling, falling, while still anchored to the ground.

He can’t do this here, right now.

“I chase you because I need you. Because if I’m not chasing something, I’m just… running.” Torch holds himself very still, the same stillness from the beach, the same stillness that betrays a riot on the inside. “I’m just that kid running from the things that haunt me. And this thing I have, whether it’s a gift or a curse, it means I have to do something. I can’t stand idly by.”

Slowly prying open his eyes, Clancy surfaces from the black waters of his mind. He grabs hold of each word the Torchbearer says and feels something in them strike true. “Do you even know what a comfort it would have been to hear that I wasn’t the only one going through this?”

One of his hands goes to his chest like he could reach inside his ribs and pull out the thing that makes him this unholy exception. Like he could crush it in his fingers if he tried.

“You kept all of this from me, trying not to push me over the edge, but now I have this power that- I’m damned if I use it, damned if I don’t. And you’re the only one who knows what that’s like.”

Torch draws further away. Not more than a few inches but just enough that he’s not touching Clancy anymore. “I just couldn’t handle the idea that it was my fault you’re like this.”

“Your fault?” Clancy can’t reconcile that idea so easily. “How would it be your fault?”

Torch finally reaches out and turns his palm up so that Clancy sees the scar written in his skin. A reminder of their promise.

“It’s like, everything ripples out from that day we left the city the first time. I led you out then, and everything changed.” Torch fights to hold himself still.

“And despite what I can do, I left you in the city all that time, knowing that Nico was using you, twisting you up, and then it was Voldsoy and the antlers. I brought you there. I did that.”

Clancy would like to ease his fears, to tell the Torchbearer that he had no part in forming Clancy into this terrible thing. But it’s not true, is it? Haven’t they both left their marks on each other? Haven’t they always been tangled in the threads of each other’s fates? Always perilously close to ceding their control to the monstrous natures lurking underneath.

So instead he says, “Maybe we both did this to each other.”

Something about it shifts the air between them, and Torch tears himself from the panic and the guilt wrapping so tightly around him to turn back to Clancy. To finally look at him. Careful with every movement not to release that violence howling from within him.

“Maybe my needing you… my inability to leave the city behind, it just broke you in two,” Clancy whispers. He traces his thumb over the scar in his own palm, before turning his gaze to the Torchbearer. Dark eyes filled with something strange, sadness tinged with wonder.

Torch smothers his fears and leans closer, like he’s certain someone might overhear. “I think we woke something up.”

Clancy’s eyes crinkle in confusion, searching the Torchbearer’s face, but before he can ask him what he means, one of the other banditos raises their voice.

“Torch! We’ve got vultures!”

They both look up and see black wings circling in the sky.

Chapter Text

It’s instinctual, grabbing Clancy by the arm and pulling him toward the safety of the trees, but while every fiber of Torch’s body is fine-tuned for rescue, he feels a twist, a rip of fabric, and Clancy pulls his arm away. There’s a moment, however brief, where Torch is thrown off-balance. The world around him reeling. This is what he was made to do, so why is Clancy fighting him?

But Clancy throws his duffel to the ground, drops to his knees, and starts digging through his few belongings.

“What are you doing?” Torch growls, teeth bared and eyes blazing. “Get on your feet now!”

The other banditos know this drill. They have already gathered their bags and disappeared into the trees. Dressed in green, they become just another spot of foliage in the underbrush. They’re kids, Clancy thinks again, and already they know how to hide themselves from the looming threat of death.

He hates it.

And he hates running.

And he hates those filthy creatures in the sky.

And he hates the Bishops behind their eyes.

So he reaches into the bottom of his bag, tears out the antlers, and raises them high. He stands to his feet, a lightning rod for the Bishops’ attention.

Torch is on him in a second, trying to wrestle his arms down to his side. “They’ll know it’s you! You can’t do this right now!”

But Clancy throws him off and plants a boot against Torch’s abdomen to kick him back into the dirt. “Let them know, I am so tired of this.”

He turns his eyes up, sees the birds circling. Only three of them. And three Bishops looking on, or only one? He’s about to find out.

Seizing the birds is less painful but still foreign, a sensation of crawling, burrowing, chewing through carrion flesh. If anything, he’s more akin to the vultures these days than to the humans he’s taken and used.

The moment he’s inside their minds, he can sense the presence of the Bishop, just one, and it’s Andre. Curious, how quickly he’s sure of that fact. And how quickly the Bishop seems to become aware that he isn’t alone here.

Clancy spreads his infection through the creatures, feels the way their wings are locked to glide on the air currents in a slow, almost lazy rotation. Up this high, it’s a battle against vertigo as well as his own sense of revulsion, the animal impulses of a creature that feasts on death blending with his own.

Sharing such a claustrophobic space with a Bishop is not unlike being locked inside their Towers, as well. He feels the other intruder push back against him in an attempt to shove him out through the door he entered by. But Clancy is angry. And not just angry, he’s incandescent with rage and hatred and violent disgust, and every twinge of fear or pain he’s ever felt at the hands of a Bishop comes roaring through him in a bloody, congealed tidal wave.

It’s not even hard. Banishing the Bishop back to his own, mortal, rotting vessel. It’s surprisingly natural, a startling cathartic pleasure. And once Clancy has total control of the birds, he turns their wings as easily as he would his own hands, relishes the way the wind glides over each feather, powerful and alive and morphed by a malicious intent.

He feels the way their instincts fight back as he forces them to plummet. They don’t understand that the battle is already fought and lost. Gravity will do the rest.

It’s not until Clancy spies the ground rushing up at him that he remembers to fear the falling. Because the rush of power is so intoxicating. But even as he realizes what’s coming, it’s too late to pull back before each of the vultures crashes into the ground, one by one, at full velocity.

The sickening thump of bodies, the shattering of hollow bones, sends him careening back into his own imperfect vessel, but he can still feel death with its claws buried deep into his chest.

He died.

He felt it.

Three times over, that terminal impact.

Then Clancy sinks sideways, crumpling to the earth like something discarded. His ears ring, vision fading in and out. Rolling onto his back, neck arching in a fight for breath, his hands spasm and drop the branched horns so that they fall to either side of him.

He wants to sink into blissful unconsciousness. But reality returns to him unbidden. Too soon he’s aware of Torch’s supine form, pushed up onto his elbows, staring back at him in shock. Too soon he sees the banditos emerge from the trees, all their mouths agape and a holy hush in the air.

Clancy blinks the sickly golden sheen from his eyes. No tears to shed for himself or the creatures he sacrificed.

One of the young banditos walks to a dead vulture and lifts it from the ground. It spins, suspended by one leg, blood running down its broken neck and dripping loudly onto stone.

“You killed them,” one of the others whispers, and her fear is only matched by a macabre delight. “You just ripped them right out of the sky!”

Against all better judgment, Clancy manages a choked laugh. It hurts, his muscles unconvinced his own neck isn't snapped.

Torch pushes up from the ground then.

At first, Clancy assumes he’ll leave him here, crumpled as he is on the ground, but after a moment’s hesitation, Torch crosses the distance and offers a hand down to pull Clancy to his feet. When he does, when they’re eye-to-eye again, Torch looks at Clancy in a way he never has before. Like he’s seeing something in Clancy for the first time. A dawning realization of an innate purpose that slowly transforms into a cautious sense of pride.

Torch is proud of what Clancy’s done.

And Clancy only wishes that he could hate it.

“We’ll meet up with the rest of the unit tomorrow,” Torch explains later as they make camp for the night.

All they have to sleep under is the tree-cover and a canopy of stars, but it’s similar enough to their camp on Voldsoy that Clancy almost feels at home.

As always Torch makes quick work of building a fire for them. “The rally point is only another half-day’s journey from here. But since we were among the first to head out, we’ll likely be the first to arrive.”

There is no room for Clancy to make himself useful here. He only has a single blanket, rolled up and shoved inside his bag along with the rest of his personal items. But he’s not thinking about sleeping now. He stares into the growing flames of their campfire while the other banditos move along his periphery.

After today’s little display, they can’t seem to keep their eyes off of him, where before they almost pretended he wasn’t there. Still, they don’t approach him. He’s not so sure which he prefers, their fear or their interest. But he knows he’ll have to deal with the matter sooner or later; they’re bound to start asking questions.

“I’ve got orders from Luna,” he mutters when Torch rocks back onto his heels and holds his palms out flat to the fire. “I’m supposed to make an appearance in Dema.”

Torch turns his head up, hands falling to his knees. “Do you want me to go with you?” It’s a kindness offered with such ease, as though it isn’t holding hands with a death sentence.

Clancy shuts his eyes while several emotions fight for dominance inside. “No. No, I don’t want you to see-”

“I think I saw enough today to know,” Torch says, slipping past Clancy’s defenses.

“It’s different when it’s a person.”

That statement is the sway of a dead man hanging from a noose, grim and final. With the creak of rope in their heads, they both watch the fire a little longer, unsure of how to proceed.

“I’d still rather be there. So I can cover you.”

The Torchbearer stands, his expression eager if still somewhat guarded. They’re trying to understand how to navigate this new dynamic, with the woods dark around them. Before it was always leader and led. Rescuer and rescued.

Now? With what he’s seen today, Torch doesn’t want to be sidelined in Clancy’s fight. He wants to be there. He wants to see it all and know what he’s gotten them both into. The price they need to pay for their freedom. And what it’s going to take to get Clancy to where he needs to be.

Sensing the nature of Clancy’s indecision, Torch adds, “They can’t hurt me anyway.”

Whether he realizes it or not, Clancy’s hand moves up, fingertips pressing to a place on his chest just to the right of his heart. But when his eyes find Torch’s, he drops his hand away again, self-conscious. “Are you sure?”

Torch remembers it distinctly. The path of the hunter’s knife through flesh, the invasive shock of betrayal setting in. He crosses his arms protectively across his chest.

“I’m still working out all the bells and whistles, but I think I can avoid that happening again.”

“You think or you know?” Clancy questions him, drawing closer so he can lower his voice. “Because you still haven’t explained how that happened, and I’m not-”

“I’ll be in just as much danger as you will,” Torch replies and shrugs his shoulders, weight shifted to one side, as casual as though they were discussing the weather. Even with a storm gathering green on the horizon.

But Clancy feels snared by this selfless offer. They haven’t discussed his actions from earlier, his blatant disregard for Torch’s orders. And somehow, he can’t shake the feeling that this is an effort to pin him down. Maintain a level of control.

Though it may be exactly what he needs.

“Okay,” Clancy breathes. “Okay, if you promise you won’t get in the line of fire.”

Grinning, Torch turns to the rest of the banditos. “Petra, you’ve got first watch. Clancy and I are going to scout the area. If you see anything, fire off the flare, got it?”

The one who spoke to Clancy before, Petra, nods her head. She pats the pocket of her coat, where the flare is supposedly kept safe, and she posts up near the fire while the others settle in for their much-needed rest.

“Come on,” Torch says with a gentle nudge to get Clancy moving, “we won’t go far.”

Then Torch is leading him into the trees, enough distance away from the camp that they won’t be seen. Clancy feels the antlers where they’re tucked under his coat, beneath the strap of his belt, closer now than he’s kept them before. Pressing into his skin.

The scent of pine is sharp in his nostrils, along with the familiar scent of fire. With the light that Torch carries and the moon to illuminate their path, it’s easy to fall into step and forget where it is they’re heading to.

Once they are far enough away from the others, Torch turns to Clancy. “Alright, I’ll follow your lead on this. Just, once you’re there, give me a moment to find you.”

Then he extinguishes the torch he carries and settles down onto the forest floor, legs crossed before him and hands perched on his knees. Clancy peers around, anxious to leave them both so exposed. But when he peers up at him, the Torchbearer seems perfectly calm.

“Do you trust me to have your back?” he asks, with a forgiving tone that lets Clancy know he’s allowed to say “no.”

Blowing out a breath, Clancy takes the antlers from his belt. “Do you trust me to have yours?”

Torch turns both his palms up, as if to say, I’m here, aren’t I?

Clancy wonders if the Torchbearer can see him smiling. “Okay then.” And he raises the antlers and slips away.

For the first few moments, he’s paralyzed. It takes time for the body to remember how to be alive. There’s the gentle creep of sensation, the way a limb feels as its regaining circulation. Hands press flat to slate gray stone. He reminds himself to breathe as the seize takes hold because the shock of the stiffness, the emptiness, the cold usually obliterates his awareness of a body’s basic needs. What it means to be human.

He hears an audible gasp from a few feet away, though his senses of perception are dulled in the first waking moments from the grave. When she leans over him, her face is colorless.

“Not yet, not yet!” Sol hisses. “You’re here too soon!”

But Clancy pushes himself up onto one elbow and then the other. Every muscle creaks. These bones feel disjointed but unbroken, at least. Sol has to be careful of how the vessel died when she makes the mark to draw him in.

“Had to be now,” he croaks. “There’s been trouble.”

And now he hears the way his new voice bounces around this open space. Unlike the quiet shelter from before, the room they’re in now is large, so that he cannot see the walls for the looming darkness. More bodies lie lined along the floor. Most of their hands and necks are still stained black, and Clancy stares long into the nearest expressionless face.

“Why are there so many,” he whispers, and he doesn’t quite manage to make it into a question.

Sol hangs her head. “The Bishops are preparing for something big, I think.” She rubs a hand across her face, and it’s even more ink-stained than it was before. Recent. “The sermons are growing darker, more insistent. People are scared. And…”

Her hand trails down to her blackened neck, rubbing like her throat is sore. “And they only just announced Keons’ death. His district- It’s been hit hard.”

“Oh.” Clancy flexes his hands next to him. He tests the way this makes him feel, that the body he occupies might once have been a neighbor. Someone he may have passed on the street.

They’re both pulled from their thoughts by the scrape of boots on the stone floor, and Sol acts quickly to put herself between this new threat and Clancy’s frozen form. But out of the darkness, into this small island of light cast by the glow of neon from above, walks the Torchbearer. He’s dressed to blend in, black and dark gray. But Clancy thinks he catches a snatch of bright red in his hair before Sol throws her arms around his neck.

“Torch!” her voice an excited whisper with most of its usual warmth. “You’re here!”

He has to catch her and keep from being bowled over at once. Arms wrapped tight, Torch casts his eyes around the rows of recently deceased over her shoulder, and his face is as unreadable as the corpses’. When he looks down to Clancy’s vessel, there’s a moment of quiet uncertainty before Clancy sits up the rest of the way, pulling the white sheet previously laid over this vessel up to his collarbone.

He nods, yes. It’s still me.

Clancy isn’t sure what to expect from him. It has to be a horrible sight, all things considered. But the Torchbearer turns his focus on Sol, pulling back from her embrace to see the ink.

“Are you alright?” he asks, his eyes tense. “You look tired…”

Their greeting gives Clancy a moment to get on his feet with the death shroud draped around him.

Sol scoffs softly. “Mind your manners, Torchbearer. You should know better than to say things like that to a lady.” But she pushes her hair back from her face and shakes her head like she can’t really argue with him. “I’m alright, really. The movement here in Dema is bringing in new people every day. It’s worth it.”

She gives his arm a squeeze. “Promise.”

Torch’s look of concern is all too pronounced now, but he looks past her to Clancy. “How about you?”

The chill of this chamber clings to him, and all Clancy wants is a place to warm up. Instead, he says, “We should move before anyone finds us.”

No one argues with that, at least.

Sol tosses Clancy the backpack full of clothes that she brought with her, and he takes a moment to slip them on. Coat, stole, and lastly, the mask. Then she leads them through a vestibule to the area reserved for the preservation of bodies. Rows of metal tables, shelves of vials and tools and plastic bottles. She turns out each light as they pass, leaving the path behind them dark once more. They have to feel their way through the last few feet to the exit, glowing red.

“Where are we exactly?” Torch asks as the metal door swings wide and the damp air of a lukewarm Dema night brushes over them.

“Nills’ district,” Sol says, taking the lead to draw them out onto the street.

But the moment Torch steps through, he knows. He’s home. The streets are dingier than he remembered. Everything’s closer together. The buildings rising high to blot out the black sky. And each neon street lamp flickers in time with the shell-shocked beat of his heart.

“I forgot,” he whispers, “how small it makes you feel.”

Sol blinks at him, but Clancy supplies the answer to her unasked question. “Torch was from this district.”

And her eyes widen, as though she can see him in a different light now. The boy he was, the citizen he left behind. “You haven’t ever been back?”

Torch shrugs, looking between them. “Not on street-level. No.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she says and huddles closer to them in the shadows as someone passes on the other side of the street, red arm band of the city watch. When they’re gone around the next corner, she whispers, “I would have warned you if I’d known.”

But Torch doesn’t like to linger here where they might be so easily spotted. He knows the cost for staying out past curfew, and he can only imagine that the stakes have gotten even higher. “Doesn’t matter now. Let’s move.”

Even though Sol takes the lead, Torch can guess where it is that they’re going. The chapel in Nills’ district is another discomfiting relic of his past, the center of many memories, of long hours spent poking the other boys from his crew to keep them awake through the sermons.

But rather than entering the main sanctuary, Sol pulls them into a small room meant for private lectures.

“I’ve got to get the word out that you’re here. It’s a little last minute, but I think we can manage,” she tells them and cuts on the light of the projector in the corner rather than the brighter ones overhead. “Stay put and stay quiet until I get back, okay?”

Then she doesn’t wait for them to answer before she lets the door to the lecture hall swing shut behind her.

Torch shivers. “God, even the smell is the same. It’s like this place is haunted.”

Clancy snorts, tugging at his mask where it snags on this vessel’s longer hair. “The only thing haunting this place is us.” He looks up and sees the Torchbearer’s distant gaze. So Clancy reaches out and tugs on a bright red curl.

“Is this for me?”

It’s enough to pull Torch out of whatever dark place he was in, because he smiles and shrugs. “I can change a few things about the projection, if I focus real hard. I figured maybe this is how I show my support. You like it?”

Clancy, as always, is a mixed bag of emotions. But he just says, “It’s pretty cool. Why only the bottom half though? Why not go full red?”

Torch dances his eyebrows up and down, his smile widening into a full grin. “Wouldn’t want them to think I’m trying to steal your thunder.”

Head and shoulders leaned together, laughing at themselves to spite the shadows all around, Clancy feels something release its hold inside his chest. And he breathes a little easier. Even within Dema’s walls.

“I’m sorry about earlier, with the vultures.” He threads the end of the silky stole through his fingers. It’s a nice texture, once he’s used to it. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

Torch shakes his head as he hops up to sit on the wooden, classroom table next to Clancy. “Wounded my pride a little, maybe. But I was mostly just surprised.” He grips his hands together in his lap, legs swaying slightly. “For a while, I thought all the fight had gone out of you. That maybe you didn’t have any left for Nico.”

He looks up, towards the glow of the projector’s bulb. “It was good to see you angry.” The grin is half-hidden in shadow but still full of the sun’s radiant gold. “I missed that version of you, the one always picking fights. I’m glad he’s still in there.”

Clancy hums a little, “Me too,” but his mind is caught on thumbing through a file of transparent projector sheets that’s been left out. Schematics of Dema, old lessons on the fundamentals of the Bishops' teachings. Everything a good vialist ought to know.

Smirking, he turns to Torch. “How well did you listen in your religious studies growing up?”

Torch just raises both his hands in defeat. “Hey, don’t look at me. We were doing good just to show up, you know that.”

But Clancy waves the folder in the air between them, what is sure to be a terrible idea dawning in his mind. “Well, it's a good thing I was teacher’s pet, then.”

Chapter Text

Faith in the traditional sense has never come easily to the Torchbearer. Vialism in all its dark glory never held a shine for him. The temptation towards self-destruction, at least within the confines of his own rebellious heart, has always originated with Clancy. A fuse in a gas tank, stolen paths into a hostile city, a knife between his ribs. Lovingly severing himself in two for the sake of the one soul he longs to save above all others. And it’s not even his own.

Because that’s what faith has always been, for as long as he has ever heard it spoken of from beneath a scarlet cowl, a careful dismantling of self to accommodate for purification. For ascendance.

And without realizing it, Torch has crafted his own religion out of this fundamental belief. That to truly love something, you must die for it.

His life has been a drawn-out burnt offering on the altar of Clancy’s continued existence. And while he has never thought of it in such specific terms, Torch has made saving people from Dema his holy mission, the fire he carries his one true act of worship. All in the name of the friend who could never be delivered to salvation. Not by Torch’s hands at least.

And yet, watching Clancy now in all his conviction, Torch realizes just how well the role of Bishop suits him. How this has been his end from the beginning. All that righteous indignation hurled down on them from a lonely pulpit. The words he has spent his whole life crafting into forked weaponry, that have grown in him out of fear and pain, blood red blossoms pushing up from his lungs.

Torch has always considered himself faithless, and it’s only now, watching Clancy teach, that he realizes he’s been mistaken all along.

“Faith doesn’t have to be a death sentence,” Clancy pleads with those gathered in this chamber. “Our tendency towards self-annihilation needs to be transformed, aimed elsewhere. If we cannot destroy the urge, we have to change the outcome. If we cannot love who we are today, we will discover who we are tomorrow. Again and again, as many times as it takes.”

Torch tears his eyes away from Clancy to study the gathered crowd and watches instead how they come alive inside the space that Clancy’s words have built for them, a shelter within the larger city. Not outside its borders, but within the framework that has already been constructed.

“Faith is not a blind leap into darkness. Faith is not bleeding yourself dry to satisfy the hunger of your own misdeeds. Faith is knowing that though the clouds have choked the sky gray, the sun is still shining somewhere beyond them, waiting to return again.”

His hands, like they always have, shape the phrases into the air as he speaks. As though he is conducting an orchestra. The motions are sweeping, leading, drawing in the attention of all who listen. He doesn’t need a song.

Clancy is the music.

“If we understand time to be more than just the fine line that our finite minds can comprehend, then all of our futures are already rooted somewhere, catching light in the sun we cannot yet see.” He reaches out, like he can almost touch it, that distant future.

“Maybe- maybe faith is understanding that there is already a version of ourselves alive in a brighter day than this one, older and wiser and happier, and we must live to reach them and let them know how much we have longed to become them. We must live to give that version of ourselves the breath to sing and laugh and sigh. We must withstand the night so that our future selves can bask in that warmth and overtake us and carry us with them into that new day.”

Clancy looks around the room slowly, as though picking out each individual face, and he asks, “Will you? Will you do that with me? Can we promise each other to live- together? That’s all I want for the future.”

His eyes find Torch’s last, holding them with a promise.

“I want to spend a sunny day with you.”

Waking up again in a forest at the edge of dawn, Torch opens his eyes to see Clancy shaking his head and rubbing at his face. Like he’s trying to clear something away. And when that isn’t enough, the heel of his hand strikes the side of his head three sharp times before his eyes seem to clear.

He blinks down at Torch, sitting among the sticks and leaves, and sees that he has returned to himself. He must see the question in his eyes, too, because Clancy gives him a tired smile.

“I can’t see the yellow on your coat anymore.”

There’s a broken note of fear in his voice as he says it, though he keeps the smile pinned in place. But Torch just rises and takes both Clancy’s wrists carefully.

“You don’t need to see it to know it’s there.”

Clancy’s lips tremble as his head nods loosely from his neck. “I know, I know.” He searches Torch’s face for any signs of disgust for the thing that he’s become, but he finds none. “I guess there’s no denying it now.”

Torch shakes his head slowly, but he never takes his eyes from Clancy’s face. “You can put it down when we’re done.” He taps one finger to the antler in his left hand. “They aren’t forever.”

“No,” he whispers and lets his eyes fall closed. “I’m really tired now.”

“Want me to carry you?” Torch teases, but he half means it. Head tilted to try to catch Clancy’s drooping gaze.

He wins himself a sleepy smile, all crooked teeth and eyelashes on his cheeks. “And they say chivalry is dead. No, I think I can make it.”

Leaning together, a calloused hand around a bone-white wrist, they stumble their way back to camp in the thin gray light of a new day.

Torch lets Clancy sleep a little into the day, even though they should be moving. He knows its rare for Clancy to rest peacefully, and he wants to grant him that, at least. He can tell that his banditos have questions. They’re a curious bunch, and he knows he’ll have to explain in time, what Clancy is and what he means to them all. But for now, he keeps them busy so that his friend can sleep.

When Torch does eventually nudge him awake, Clancy pulls the extra shirt from over his eyes and blinks into the morning sun.

“Rise and shine, sleeping beauty. It’s time to go.”

Clancy tugs the shirt back over his face. “Ten more minutes.”

“Nuh uh, I’ve already given you ten minutes and then some. Up and at ‘em.” Torch pokes at Clancy’s ribs and watches the other man jerk and twist away from him.

Clancy grunts as he pushes himself up from the ground. “I’m telling Luna you’re a tyrant when we meet up again.” Rubbing his face with the backs of his hands, Clancy nearly trips over his own pack as he disentangles from his blanket. “This is an abuse of authority.”

“You whine like a baby,” Torch grumbles and tugs the front of Clancy’s beanie down to his nose. “She’ll probably congratulate me for getting you to move at all.”

Smirking and pushing the beanie back from his eyes, Clancy takes a half-hearted swipe at Torch’s nose before bending down to gather his stuff back into his bag. “That’s if we make it back at all with you leading the way. Did you even sleep last night? Those eye bags are getting so heavy, they're going to drag your whole face down!”

He lifts the ukulele from where he rested it the night before. He’s cobbled together another makeshift strap, which he loops over one shoulder, his bag on the other. As he does though, Petra looks up from covering the remains of their campfire.

“Do you still play?” she asks with ashes on her fingers and even some dusting the end of her nose from where she’s rubbed her face.

Clancy smiles nervously, eyes shifting to Torch for a moment. “Um, yeah, sometimes.”

“I heard your song from inside Dema,” one of the boys is quick to say. “The one you and Torch did together over the city’s sound system.”

Clancy blinks at them, unsure of what to say except for, “What did you think?”

The kid grins with a broken front tooth and firefly eyes. “Well, it was different. I’ve never heard anything like it, I guess.”

“Different,” Clancy says to Torch who shrugs his shoulders in response. “I’ve heard worse.”

“When we gather for summer festivals the Torchbearer still plays the drums sometimes,” Petra says, like she knows she’s ratting him out.

Torch gives her a playful scowl as Clancy’s eyes alight. “Oh, does he? You know, I taught him everything he knows when it comes to music.”

“I’m self-taught,” Torch corrects him and shoves once at Clancy’s shoulder. “But I’ll admit, he got me started.”

“Oh, will you ever play together for the camp? Like you did before!” Petra’s excitement, while charming, makes something slightly painful twist in Clancy’s gut.

His smile falters. “I don’t know about…”

But Torch is quick to jump in. “Maybe someday, but right now, we should get moving before we waste too much daylight.”

As the others break to get the last of the camp packed up and fall into formation, Torch checks Clancy’s eyes and gets another tight smile. “They just want to know you.”

And Clancy frets at his beanie where its pulled down to cover his ears now. “I know, but the music… I don’t know if I’m ready for that.”

“Don’t push it,” Torch assures him. “No one’s forcing you to sing out here.”

When Clancy nods, they head out to cover the last stretch. As they go, Torch reaches out to take hold of Clancy’s arm intermittently.

“Just checking our surroundings,” he whispers the first time that Clancy gives him a worried, sideways look. “It’s disorienting when I’m both at once. I just need…”

But casting the projection out from where he is, he senses another group close to converging with their own. Trench guides him, almost taking him by the hand, and leads the ghostly form to where he needs to go.

They aren’t anyone from his unit, and at first Torch can’t place them at all, until he sees who is in the lead of them. When he settles back into his body again, rolling his shoulders and shaking his hands out, Torch casts a glance to one of the nearest banditos and motions for them to change course slightly.

Clancy notices the change and frowns. “What is it? Trouble?” His fingers inch towards the antler at one hip, but Torch reaches down to stay his hand.

“Leave them covered, okay? It’s another bandito unit. Let me take point.”

Their eyes meet, steel on steel, and Clancy recognizes the Torchbearer’s mask slipping back into place. Which means Clancy was right to assume there might be trouble, just not the kind he can fight with his newfound power. This kind requires Torch’s influence. It requires Clancy’s faith in him.

“Yeah,” Clancy whispers. “I’ll follow your lead.”

Torch’s jaw twinges, eyes glazing over. “Just don’t let him goad you into arguing with him, okay?”

Then he turns and strides a few paces ahead, distancing himself from Clancy. But at least now Clancy can recognize this form of protection for what it is. The Torchbearer is the shield that Torch puts between Clancy and the rest of the world, and when Clancy is ready to step out from behind that shield, Torch is willing to let him. But for now, with whatever he has seen coming their way, he’s taken up that mantle of protection again, perhaps for both their sake.

Not ten minutes later, they cross paths with the other group. All of them banded with tape that Clancy can only just register as yellow by its contrast to the rest of their green clothing. He finds himself blinking his eyes repeatedly, like he might clear the fog from them and restore the saturation to his vision. But nothing changes.

He tries not to feel the loss too acutely.

“Thought we might find you headed this way,” the leader of this new group calls as he crosses the last distance through the trees to stand in front of Torch.

The way that the Torchbearer’s body language has gone defensive, Clancy takes it that he’s not fond of this person.

“We had an incursion of goners near the temporary camp. Luna decided it was time to scramble and regroup.” Torch’s gaze flickers from the leader over the rest of the gathered banditos, all of whom stand apart in a way that Clancy finds off-putting.

He’s known the banditos to be a distrustful group, especially with him, but that he knows of, none of these people ought to even recognize who he is, not with the antlers hidden away beneath his coat.

But still, the leader’s sights seem to set on him right away.

“You’ve got the new Bishop with you, I see.” There’s an oily grin that makes Clancy think of certain Dema citizens who took pride in showing their loyalty to the Bishops through violence against others. He wonders that such things don’t need the city to breed in human hearts. “Decided pink wasn’t your color after all?”

And then Clancy remembers - the broadcasts. He hadn’t thought much about whether or not the banditos all would have seen them, but apparently this guy has. Clancy takes it he didn’t like what he saw either.

“Back off, Arrow,” Torch grumbles, taking a step to put himself between the two to break the unit leader’s line of sight. “It won’t do anyone any good provoking him.”

Arrow glances back over his shoulder to the portion of his unit that’s with him. Clancy doesn’t need to count them to know they outnumber their own group, or that most of their members are older, stronger. They look a little wilder, too.

He’s heard rumors before in Dema, that certain members of the banditos are born on the outside. Those living like savages who have never known the teachings of vialism to curb their darker instincts. He can spot the propaganda for what it is these days, but he also can't help but wonder if certain parts of it weren’t rooted in truth.

“Oh, we’ve heard exactly what Clancy here can do when provoked. Word from Dema says his cult is really picking up steam, so all the Bishops are doubling down on their efforts. Seems to me like he's done his job,” Arrow says, directed at Torch but loud enough that Clancy can’t miss a single word. “We could take him off your hands if he’s too much trouble.”

Clancy’s heart stutters in his chest, but with an incline of Torch’s chin, the rest of the banditos close in around Clancy as if somehow they can block a direct attack. But half of them are shorter than he is, with just as much skin on their bones.

“I told you before,” Torch says, his voice deathly cold, “I can handle him.”

But Arrow isn’t going to step down now. No, by the look in his eyes, he’s just getting started, and the rest of the people with him are no less eager to have their pound of a Bishop’s flesh. Even a fledgling one.

“Can you? I don’t know that I trust your judgment, Torchbearer,” Arrow hisses, and this time when he moves to look past Torch and his eyes settle on Clancy, he grins from ear to ear. “Just because it looks human doesn’t mean its any different than those old corpses burying dozens a day in Dema. Better to put it down now-”

The group of banditos start closing in, and Torch shoves Arrow backwards.

“Over my dead body-”

“That might be exactly what he’s hoping for,” Arrow laughs and turns to Clancy again. “Come on, call off your dog, Clancy! If you’re so reasonable, let’s talk this out!”

Before this can escalate any further, Clancy pushes his way through the unit three banditos and steps forward.

“Torch?”

Eyes ablaze and hands set for war, the Torchbearer is a holy pillar of fire standing between Clancy and the threat of danger, but with just a word, he takes a step back. Just one. Just enough to give Clancy room to speak, but still close enough to impose himself if necessary.

“Obedient, aren’t you?” Arrow mutters, looking Torch up and down with a sneer. “This is exactly why I didn’t want you taking the lead on this. He compromises your loyalty.”

Clancy jerks his chin at Arrow. “Funny because I thought we were all supposed to be on the same side.”

Arrow grabs the front of Clancy’s jacket and hauls him closer a step, and while Torch moves in to act, Clancy just lifts a hand to stop him.

“I will never side with a death-eater like you,” Arrow spits in his face, and Clancy has to contain his own boiling rage. “You smear your black filth on everything we stand for.”

“I’m trying to save lives,” Clancy argues and clasps his other hand around Arrow’s wrist. “Yours and the citizens’. In case you forgot, they need protection, too.”

“And you’re the one to offer that, huh? Just because some other monster gave you a set of bones, now you get to be king?” Arrow steps closer, crowding Clancy, stealing all the oxygen between them. “You ask me, we’re just replacing one Blurryface with the next in line. Repeating the same old cycle of violence.”

Clancy’s golden brown eyes flicker back and forth across Arrow’s face until he takes a thin breath and whispers, “And you’d end that cycle with one more death? Do you think that would do it?”

He puts his hand out to Torch.

“Give me your knife.”

The Torchbearer’s face drains of blood. “Clancy-”

But he doesn’t drop his hand until Torch reaches into his pocket and draws out the old switchblade. It settles, warm and darkly familiar into Clancy’s palm. He doesn’t even have to look to flick it open.

Arrow flinches, like he’s ready to defend himself, but Clancy just offers him the handle.

“Go ahead, then.” He doesn’t take his eyes from Arrow’s, lets them bore in deep. “If you think you can fix it all on your own. Bring down the Bishops with all that self-righteous fury, be my guest, but leave the rest of them out of this. They’re on your side.”

Arrow takes the handle of the knife, and Clancy can feel the cold sting as the blade settles on his neck. Just a little prick. Drop of crimson small as the head of a pin. He keeps staring right into Arrow’s soul, not an ounce of fight in him.

“Go on, hero. Slay the beast. See how you like having blood on your hands.”

Recoiling back in an instant, Arrow drops the knife so that it falls into the grass between their boots. He looks between Clancy and Torch once more before motioning to the rest of his banditos to head out.

“Let’s leave the Corpsebearer to his Bishop,” he mutters, and they lose no time disappearing back into the trees.

Shaky with relief, Clancy sinks down to retrieve Torch’s switchblade from the ground. When he reaches out to hand it back, Torch grabs him by the collar instead.

“You ever pull a stunt like that again, I’ll break your neck,” he growls and uses the collar of Clancy’s shirt to pull him in for a quick crush of a hug.

“Knew he was too chicken to do it,” Clancy mutters, but the jitters in his voice say otherwise. “Just putting on a show.”

“Still,” even when they pull apart, Torch grabs Clancy by the back of the neck, tension in every muscle. “Don’t ever-”

“I won’t,” Clancy promises, one hand on Torch’s wrist where it’s curled against his neck and the other still clutched tight around the switchblade. He shuts his eyes to release a shuddering sigh.

“I won’t.”

Chapter Text

Torch watches from a careful distance as Clancy eats by the fire with a gaggle of the younger banditos crowding around him.

“He looks tired,” Luna comments as she comes to stand beside him. She nurses a cup of coffee that she holds between her gloved hands, the steam curling upward lazily in the early morning sunlight.

“We had a rough journey,” Torch says shortly.

He watches Petra lean closer to Clancy, a look of animated excitement in her eyes as she’s saying something, and he sees too how Clancy all but flinches backward from her. Like he’s afraid she might burn him. Or, more likely, the other way around.

“He’s had to push himself more than I’d like.”

And this carries a quiet note of warning. He doesn’t want Luna to think she can command Clancy at every turn. Even used judiciously, he’s a fragile tool. And any amount of outside influence is going to compromise Clancy’s already wounded sense self-control.

“He doesn’t need your coddling, Torch,” Luna counters, pulling the mug away from her face to glare at him. “He’s endured a lot worse than you give him credit for, and I’m just trying to make sure he stays on target.”

She won’t let Torch forget that despite the fact that he has a tenuous position on their council, she is still his unit leader.

No lone wolves among the banditos.

When he doesn’t argue - because he knows better than that - Luna nods back in Clancy’s direction. “But I am glad he managed to charm the younger ones, at least. It’ll be good for the others to see him as more than just some vulture skulking on the edges of camp.”

“I’m sure that wasn’t your design at all, sending them with us,” Torch observes with a begrudging smirk and an eyebrow raised in her direction.

“There’s too many skeptics in the camp,” Luna concedes and sips her coffee. “But no one can resist Petra when she’s excited about something. Figured if he was going to win anyone over, it would be her and her crew.”

Torch accepts the mug when she offers it to him, and he sips from the other side, frowning suddenly. “Guess I should mention we ran into Arrow and some of unit one on our way here.”

Luna’s distant expression turns colder. “Oh? I’m sure that went well.” Sarcasm drips from every word. “I take it he recognized Clancy.”

Swallowing, Torch hands the mug back to her and gives a detached summary of the events from their run-in with the unit one leader. When he finishes, Luna takes another look at Clancy, as though reassessing a previous judgment, and shakes her head.

“He’s crazier than I thought.”

The muscles in Torch’s shoulders and neck tense. He doesn’t want to admit how terrifying it was to stand by and watch Arrow hold a knife to Clancy’s throat. Worse, to know that Clancy let him. Goaded him like he couldn’t care less either way.

“Is it crazy if it worked?”

“When he’s angry, I wouldn’t trust Arrow with a toothpick, let alone a knife,” she grumbles and massages her temple. “But he’s like family, you know? You can’t pick ‘em. And his unit has lost almost half their number to wandering Bishop raids. He was bound to be the hardest sell.”

“Do you think he’ll still fight with us, if it comes to it?” Torch asks, giving voice to the thought that’s been weighing on his mind since the encounter. If they keep running off all their allies, he and Clancy may be standing alone against the Bishops.

Luna finishes off the last of the coffee and presses the back of her gloved hand to her mouth. Her calculating eyes watch Clancy as he tells some story, his hands outstretched and encompassing something invisible, with all the young banditos holding onto his every word. She sighs.

“I don’t doubt he’ll fight with us. Arrow is a lot of things, but he won’t compromise this movement. If anything, he holds us all to a higher standard than anyone.”

“Then, what’s bothering you?” Torch can see the tension in her eyes, and when she does turn her face to look at him, there’s a distance that he hasn’t felt from her since they met. He feels unmoored, without her there as his anchor.

“I’m-” She takes a deep breath, seems to configure the words in her head before saying, “You let my little sister walk back into Dema. Everything I’ve done to ensure Clancy’s safety for you, and you just-”

Luna waves a hand to stop him when he opens his mouth to explain.

“Oh, I know. I know, it was her idea, and she convinced you it was best for Clancy. But that’s exactly my point.” Luna’s eyes are broken but it only makes the resolve behind them more evident. Fury and sorrow wrestling for the upper-hand.

Not warning her about Clancy’s seizing made her angry.

This - for all the world, it looks like Torch has managed to break her heart.

She speaks again before he can. “I trust you more than anyone here, and twice now you’ve- The Torch that I knew a few years ago would have done anything to stop someone from going back to Dema. Anything.”

She studies his face carefully, as though trying to find the person she recognizes beneath whoever she’s looking at now. “Just tell me how far you’re willing to go to keep him alive. I need to know.”

Pinned down by guilt and uncertainty, Torch shrugs, head dropping as the creeping sensation up his spine makes him want to run. “I don’t know what you want from me.”

“I want the truth,” Luna presses, her voice lowered so that no one else can hear. “I want to know how many of us you think Clancy’s life is worth.”

“I am not trading lives, Luna,” Torch argues, and he’s having trouble keeping his own voice quiet now. He darts his eyes around them. “Sol isn’t a child either, and I’ve seen her-”

“You what?” Luna snaps and drags him by the shoulder of his hoodie, further from the rest of those gathered around eating. “You projected into Dema? That far?”

Suddenly her anger has shifted again into astonishment, and Torch just shrugs, unsure of why this matters. “Sure, I guess I hadn’t thought about it, but-”

But Clancy needed him. He knew he couldn’t send him back into the city so soon, all alone. So Torch hadn’t even considered that the distance might be too far for him to cross. He had only done what he needed to do.

It’s only now, with Luna holding up it to his attention, that he realizes he might have done something peculiar.

“You two,” Luna whispers, almost disdainfully. “If you were conjoined at the hip you couldn’t be more co-dependent.” She pinches the bridge of her nose. “Was she alright?”

Torch blinks at her. He’s working through far too many emotions at once to follow. She keeps changing the subject just as he’s trying to process the one that came before.

Her patience wearing thin, Luna sighs. “Sol. Was she okay?”

“She was…” In Dema. Subjected to the worst the Bishops have to offer in their mad dash to regain control with Clancy’s movement spreading like wildfire. “She was determined. You two have that in common.”

But that doesn’t seem to put Luna’s fears to rest. She looks to be all but grinding her teeth.

“I just wish I’d had more time with her…” She hangs her head, the halo of her hair forming a curtain around her eyes. “I was just so busy with everything else. Things were falling apart, and you were almost killed, and then she was just gone-”

Luna flexes her empty hand at her side, but Torch can see it shaking.

He takes the mug from her hands and sets it in the grass at his feet before placing a prompting hand on her elbow. He’s not used to being the one to do this, not with her, and he isn’t sure how she’s going to respond right now. Especially to him.

But rather than pulling away, she just lets her head fall with a thump against his chest, and he wraps her in a careful hug.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers with his head tipped down near her ear. But he knows it isn’t enough. They’ve all done things they can’t atone for now. Luna was the last person that Torch ever wanted to betray.

“I’ll make it up to you, I swear.” He’ll get Sol out again if it kills him, if only to prove that he's still the person she believed in.

“Oh, stop,” Luna mutters, that old familiar fondness creeping back into her voice. “I’ll forgive you. Maybe not today. Being angry keeps me going, but eventually-”

When she raises her head to look at him again, he’s not sure what to say or do. He finds himself just waiting for her to give him an order, a chance to be useful. But she just reaches up a hand to cover his eyes.

“Quit with the big brown puppy stare. You’ve apologized, that’s enough for now.” She pushes him back a step and breaks their hug. “Go save your boy from Petra before she gets her good intentions all over him. You know those are impossible to wash out.”

Torch gives her a hesitant smile and backs away towards the fire.

He’s only just settled down with his food - across from Clancy so that he can watch the show but close enough to intervene if things get truly dire - when they hear the heads-up that another group from their unit is approaching. He decides to let the others see to it for once.

Clancy scoots closer once there are spots free and tips his plate towards Torch. “Want any of mine?” It looks like he’s barely touched his food.

Torch searches his eyes. “I’m good. You should keep your strength up.”

But Clancy just shrinks in on himself as the rest of the banditos around them all rush to welcome those returning. “Seizing ruins my appetite. I can’t-” He looks down at the small portion of meat on his plate. “It all smells rotten to me.”

“Here, how about a trade?” Torch spoons the majority of his porridge onto Clancy’s plate and takes the strips of meat away. “Better something than nothing, right?”

Clancy doesn’t seem to think so, but to assuage Torch’s worries, he lifts a spoonful to his mouth anyway. They only make it through a few bites together before a pair of banditos carry the body into camp. The silence that accompanies such an arrival makes them both look up from their meals.

Torch swallows the food in his mouth like he’s swallowing concrete. Then he rises from his place by the fireside and crosses the distance to meet them. It’s one of their own they carry, yellow tape around his left forearm and another strip across the back of his shoulders. One side of his head is caved in.

“We think he fell into the gorge east of here,” they report as Luna appears at Torch’s shoulder. “Took us a while to get him out.”

“You think he fell?” Luna asks. Her voice is kept at an even keel. Her face a sombre mask. But Torch knows she must be exhausted, given everything.

“No one was with him,” one of them whispers. “He wandered off after dark, and when he didn’t come back…”

He fell, Torch thinks, and he hopes that they’re right. Casualties in Trench aren’t unheard of, but suicides, unfortunately, aren’t either. Torch remembers him - Tobias was his name, he thinks. He used to fold scraps of paper into little birds.

“We’ll have to build a pyre,” Luna sighs. “The ground hasn’t thawed enough for a grave.” She shuts her eyes but motions for them to follow her. “I’ll show you where you can put him for now.”

“He didn’t kill himself.”

Torch jumps. He hadn’t heard Clancy creep up behind him.

“What did you say?”

The two banditos carrying the body stop, and Clancy walks over to them. He kneels, taking the corpse’s hand from where it was crossed over his chest. Clancy’s eyes are lost in some in-between place with a curious tilt to his brow. Everyone watches him in quiet shock.

“He didn’t jump. The grass was wet, and he slipped in the dark and fell.” He lifts the hand for them to see the traces of dirt beneath the fingernails. “He tried to catch himself- He says he’s sorry.”

Seemingly unaware of the strangeness of this proclamation, Clancy glances up at one of the two banditos on either side of the body. “He says you always told him to take a light with him when he went out alone, and he never listened. But he wants you to know it was really just an accident.”

“Is this some kind of a sick joke to you?” the bandito snaps at Clancy, tears forming in his already blood-shot eyes.

“I was just-” Clancy starts, baffled. A rosy blush rising in his cheeks, like only now he's registering what's happening.

“Just get away from him!”

And Clancy drops the corpse’s hand, staggers back a faltering step. When he does, Luna gives Clancy a final appraising glance - he is crazy, it seems to say - before she leads the others away.

Torch frowns at him, then drops his eyes to where Clancy has moved his coat aside to rest his hand on the antler on his hip. When he sees Torch notice, Clancy moves his jacket back into place to cover it.

Grabbing for a set of plastic jugs nearby, Torch jerks his head in the direction of the tree-line. “Come on. We’re getting water.” He holds one of the jugs out for Clancy to take, and when he does, Torch leads the way out of camp.

Once he’s sure they’re out of earshot of the others, he asks, “How?”

“I can see them sometimes,” Clancy whispers, the empty jug thumping against his thigh with each step. “If they haven’t- if they haven’t been dead for long. Sometimes the souls linger. Yours did.”

“Mine?”

Clancy’s empty gaze follows Torch’s hand, curled over the scar they both know too well. “I think I guided you back. I don’t know that it would’ve worked for anyone else. I didn’t know how it worked for you at the time, but now I think it’s because you’re… more. You’ve always traveled the in-between.”

Then his brow furrows. “You never told me how it happened.”

Torch presses his hand flat to his chest and looks away. He doesn’t like to think about it, and this is all entirely too much to process at once. Clancy speaking to the dead, saving his life. Again.

But they can’t afford to keep secrets anymore.

“We had a spy in the camp,” Torch explains when he can get enough air inside his lungs to do so, “sent by Nico to figure out how I project. He was just this kid. We had no way of knowing…”

Clancy’s already clouded face goes absolutely stormy as the shade of each passing tree slides across his features. “Nico knows about you?”

“He figured it out, on one of your escape attempts. He could see my projection even when you couldn’t.” Torch remembers that day well, a shower of yellow petals and a body in a shallow riverbed.

“He found out I was projecting to you on Voldsoy, but that it left my real body basically defenseless, so-”

“You told some random kid about how your projecting works and what you were doing with it?” Clancy snaps at him. “Did everyone on the whole continent know before me?”

In an impossibly small voice, Torch answers, “He reminded me of you.”

Clancy stops and looks at Torch who is forced to halt his trudging march through the forest to wait. Somehow, it’s difficult to see all those versions of him at once. The Torchbearer, his guard and defender, the stony-faced terror that steals citizens away in the night, and this broken, beautiful, bloody-knuckled creature with too much heart for someone so exposed.

“Where’s this spy now?” Clancy asks. The flash bang of images, of what Clancy would like to do should he ever get his hands on that person, is a truly ugly display. Not worthy to speak of, just his own sick imaginings.

Torch sighs. “Sol took him with her back to Dema, so the Bishops would be less likely to suspect her.”

Clancy nods once, then walks past Torch in the direction of the river. “Good thing for him.”

Watching his retreating back, Torch feels a chill run down his spine, but he follows, quick so he doesn’t lose sight of him through the trees.

When Clancy dreams of home, he dreams of the hallways in the Tower. He does not picture the safe confines of his gray apartment, slotted like so many others into the symmetrical framework of a brutalist city block. Not the secretive, seductive forests of Trench or the slope of the celestial firmament above the eerie island. Instead, he walks the labyrinthine layout of Nico’s tower. Winding halls and unlocked rooms full of night-terrors. With the cloying scent of blood and sweat and ink to chase his senses.

He dreams of a neon symbol, the three-pronged fork of the United Vialists. Of sagging against its branches in exhaustion and praying for forgiveness. He dreams of its cold fire. The shivering crunch of shattered glass beneath his bare feet.

Always the path is slightly different. As though the rooms are fitted together in illogical ways, hardly representative of their actual physical form. A hidden, half-sized door where there should not be one, a hanging, wrought iron staircase spiraling up to a space that did not previously exist. And every time that Clancy is forced to wander there through the unreal passageways of memory, he feels the mark in his skin begin to itch.

It was Nico’s final gift to him, before the Annual Assemblage.

In those half-starved, lightless days between his attempt with the razor blade and the crushing waves of the Paladin Strait, he spent nearly every hour in Nico’s domain. He had earned his stripes, each ragged red line. Paid for by his own rebellion, measured out in lashes meant to stamp the last of his insolence out of him before the true purchase was finalized.

And this written guarantee came in the shape of that forked symbol he’d known all his life. Burned between his shoulder blades in a permanent display of ownership. Lest he forget.

His irrevocable link to Nico, the skin-deep seal on his eternal fate. At the time, he’d resigned himself to his end as a sainted vessel wrapped in scarlet, hands forever stained. Just a tool to further a dying man’s flee from the grave.

Now, waking or sleeping, the brand is there as a threat. He’s flown his cage, but every step he takes in this battle is one closer to that Tower. Delivering himself back to the hands that wound so artfully.

And the itch of it is not so bad but always present. Always making itself known in those quiet moments between breaths, when he thinks that he’s alright. Right between his shoulder blades, difficult to reach but impossible to ignore.

“Do you know the secret to hunting a rabbit?” the voice whispers in his ear, tickling his skin as Clancy freezes in his dead-man’s shuffle through the endless halls. He can feel the chill of a crisp, white morning in a forest filled with indigo secrets. The memory of Torchbearer guiding him through the hunt.

Only it’s overlaid with memories of a black burning car on an icy road. Clancy’s desperate clawing at the door until instead he shattered the window and crawled out. And then running, heart pounding, legs pumping beneath him for all they were worth. Racing into the black and white trees with a demon on his heels. How it shouted, calling him by name.

Oh, how frantically he fled. Is still fleeing.

“Patience.”

Chilled lips press on the shell of his ear, cold hands creeping down his arms. “When you frighten them and they run,” the voice croons, deep and billowing like smoke, “they almost always circle back to where they started.”

He’s caught suddenly in a snare, the rip of a rope tightening around his neck, choking off his supply of the shivering winter air. Everything goes red, wracked and hazy.

Enveloped in the sudden rush of Nico’s robes, Clancy feels the tide of a seize rising all around him. Hot like blood. A sweet welcome home.

“There you are, little rabbit.”

Chapter Text

This memory is older, but he recalls it with such clarity.

Dressed in his best shirt, buttoned too tightly at the throat, he stands patiently in a small room lit from above by a glaring white light. He can hear its buzz, feel the twitch it causes in his eye. This is where he’s been told to wait. This is where he thought he would end his life.

He is sixteen and so frightened. He is here as his Bishop’s most erudite pupil, to meet a man he’s only heard about. He is resisting the urge to check to see if the door is locked.

The shirt he wears is a pale, milky blue, and the door set into the far wall is a similar shade. Seeing color here in this quiet, holy place is odd. But he finds the congruity comforting, as though symbolic that everything is as it should be. He has made the correct choice.

When the door opens, though, his heart jumps in a riot. As though to claw its way out of him. Like swerving a car into the path of on-coming traffic, there’s a flash of the instinctual human fear of death.

He doesn’t want to die.

But he’s already here. He’s made his choice.

“Tyler,” the man says in greeting. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

He bows his head on instinct, as well. That little prey animal tick in the back of his head, knowing that peering into the eyes of a predator is tantamount to a challenge. This is the most respected of the Bishops. And easily the most feared.

But to fear is to love. To fear is to worship. And he is a faithful vialist.

“Keons informs me you wish to ascend ahead of the Assemblage,” Nico croons in a voice like black velvet. “Tell me, is that true?”

Tyler hides his shaking hands behind his back and feels the brush of the cold metal table waiting for him. He lets himself lean his weight against it slightly, for support. “Y-yes, Father.”

“You know that being called to the Assemblage is a great honor. Why would you deny yourself that privilege?” Nico places the thin - painfully thin - file folder printed with Tyler’s name onto the edge of the counter by the doorway.

There’s a sink set into the stone counter, and a stand nearby where a pure white ceramic bowl sits, filled with inky liquid. Awaiting its use.

Drawing nearer, the Bishop smiles beneath his veil. “Do you fear that you will change your mind?”

“No, no,” Tyler answers quickly, head shaking and heart quaking. But it is the chiefest of sins to lie to a Bishop, so he whispers softly, “Yes.”

Peering up even with his head still hunched forward, shoulders folding in to shrink himself down as small as he can, he says, “I’m- I’m tired all the time now. But I can’t sleep, and every day the thoughts get worse.”

He just wants to die clean. Frightened of what he would do if left to his own devices.

“Please, I just want to be done now.”

Nico cradles his face in both his hands and lifts his head. Such fondness in his gaze, it brings tears to Tyler’s already tired eyes. “Oh, my child, I understand your pain. And I am prepared to end it today, should you truly wish it.”

Tyler’s swollen eyelids slip closed, and he sags into the hands that hold his face so tenderly. He releases a weary breath as relief floods in like the tide. “Yes, I’m ready.” He moves to lie down on the table, but Nico’s hands slide to grasp his shoulders, stopping him.

“A moment, my child. There is one last step to this process before we can begin.” He slips one hand beneath his vestments to rest on something out of Tyler’s sight. “A final test.”

Tyler is weary of tests. Keons has already placed him under so many, testing and trying him to be sure he is fit for glorification. All he has endured and all he has passed. He thought that his invitation to the Assemblage meant that his trials were completed.

But he nods anyway. He cannot deny a Bishop his request.

“Look up at me.”

Something strange and terrible occurs then. There’s a gasp as something rips down the seams of Tyler’s mind. A door flung open on its hinges, the lock forever destroyed. He’s felt the sinking sensation of a smearing before, but this is new, this is different. This is so much worse.

There is a monster inside of him, one he has always known but never been able to name. The thing that keeps him up at night, the thing that haunts his dreams, the thing that drives him toward every ledge with the promise of wax wings. It raises up at the Bishop’s calling, oily and wrong but somehow innate. It responds to this power that Nico holds - as like calls to like. And Tyler’s eyes glaze over, his will power slipping away with hardly a whimper.

There’s something like recognition in Nico’s face. Anger in part, but satisfaction in the whole. “So, I’ve found you at last.” It’s a sneer now, laced with contempt on his tongue. “Did you think you could hide from me forever?”

The thing living - if he could even call it “living” - inside of Tyler doesn’t respond verbally, but he feels the same flicker of familiarity. The grimy sludge of hatred in his lungs. A meeting of old foes. He is merely the unwitting battleground, burned and razed by the salt churned into the earth.

This time when Nico brushes a hand over his cheek, Tyler is aware of his own revulsion, of the knowledge that this thing touching him is rotten to the core. It whispers, “Hello, Clancy.”

He wakes to scarlet skies. The storm that’s been building off the coast has come to brew above their heads at last. In his bones, he can feel the pressure changing. Dropping like a stone.

The air outside the tent is charged, electric.

His body’s movements are the aching drag and thump of total defeat. One step after the other. A painful jerk of the shoulders. The eyes lost and wandering low, sweeping side to side. No one seems to notice as he passes through them, the shadow in their midst. Just a vapor.

They are accustomed to looking away from what they do not wish to see. What they cannot begin to understand.

The pyre at the edge of camp has burned down to almost nothing. Such a sad, smoldering display. They avoid the remains of the death in their midst, content to have destroyed the earthly vessel and ensure it will not walk anew. A senseless waste, a sort of childish cruelty to deny a soul its last measure of devotion to a just and worthy cause, out of their spite for authority.

But there are other ways to use such grim gifts.

With these two unworthy hands he gathers up the ashes, cupped in chilled palms and transferred to a small leather pouch. This he tucks away, out of the sight of wandering eyes.

Even within the city walls, not all who perish are fit to ascend. There are the faithless ones, those that are forced to return, either by nature of a Bishop’s rescue or as a fallen vessel, marred by an imperfect nature, unfit to be treated for eventual use. No, those that found no righteousness in death are put to a different purpose. Their bodies reduced to ashes and those ashes fuel for a higher cause.

In a way, it’s a mercy given to the unbelieving - to be granted one last opportunity to serve the greater glorification of Dema.

And even the measures that the rebels take to avoid their earthly fates only helps to draw them back into the flock. Step by unwilling step.

Were he able to prepare the proper mixture of elements, he could perhaps ensure a more potent victory, but the ashes alone - in the hands of a Bishop - will suffice to do what Nico has come all this way to accomplish.

The Torchbearer wakes to the shrill cry of a dying animal. He jolts from his dreams of a winter wood and lies on his back to catch his breath. An arm tossed across his eyes, he focuses on the quiet task of settling back into his own body.

It’s more difficult these days, especially upon waking, like his spirit has grown in its days wandering and does not entirely fit inside a mortal frame any longer. Shrinking himself down to fit within his skin is somewhat painful, itchy and leaving an uneasy sensation in his gut. The projection fights the effort to contain it.

Eventually though, he sighs. It’s good enough, it must be, and he rises from the warm cocoon of blankets to step into his boots and lace them up. And the air is warmer, he realizes as he dresses, unseasonably clinging close and full of humidity. There’s a distinct buzz tingling across his skin.

In the distance, he can hear the first rumble of thunder.

But besides that, the camp is audibly quiet. He casts his gaze around to see that the others have already risen for the day. Brow furrowing, he wonders why no one tried to wake him. Luna agreed the night before they should send out another group of scouts to scan the surrounding area for signs of trouble, and he thought she intended him to lead them out at dawn.

Tossing the tent flap aside, Torch steps out to meet the day. It’s well past sunrise now, judging by the position of the sun, but the clouds are rolling in quickly. Swift to blot out the sky. And all around the camp, there isn’t a soul to be seen.

Torch waits a moment. For the dream to snap or the joke to grow old - as sure as he is standing here that this cannot be real. They wouldn’t abandon the camp in the night. They wouldn’t leave without him. It’s too ridiculous.

And yet.

He cannot bring himself to break the silence. The terror grips him quite suddenly that if no one is jumping out at him from the shadows, if he isn’t asleep as he first assumed, then something has gone very, very wrong.

As another rolling wave of thunder descends over the valley, the very ground beneath his feet rumbles. Trench raises her lumbering head, and Torch feels the crushing weight of the hand that moves his fate.

He’s gone from himself in an instant, gone from the moment and the place that he understands as “present” and is swept along on an unyielding current to a vision of bodies marching along beneath the trees. Faces set towards the city. And just as quickly, he is dropped back inside of himself and the order from below is clear.

Run.

They have the advantage of a head-start, but he has the advantage of speed and pure, unadulterated desperation. Their dragging gait is next to aimless, though the final destination is clear. But he cannot - will not - lose them all in a single day.

Rocks and trees and hills and ravines, they are little more than passing visions. Shadowy specters on the walls over a stone cavern. The Torchbearer is light and quick and full of fury. This thing will not take the ones he cares about. Not again, not again.

Never again.

The thunder is just behind him now, rolling on and on, the threat of rain so heady with petrichor that he can taste it. As the trees await, the clouds anticipate. With baited breath for the first of the heavy spring downpour.

When he spies the first of them walking through the trees and the fresh budding green leaves in the underbrush, Torch flies to them until he reaches out to cling to the closest bandito he can lay his hands on. He pulls them to a stop.

Their eyes are gone, two light bulbs who have blown a fuse. Their mouth hangs slack at the corners. The black on their throat is all-consuming.

He wants to scream.

The work of a Bishop - and Torch knows he cannot stop them for long. The pull is too great. The path to the grave. He cannot hold them all back, no matter how much he wishes that he could. Holding onto them isn’t how he stops this, but spilling Bishop’s blood might be.

Racing through their numbers, he’s looking for the red robe at the lead, but weaving through the rows of lifeless banditos is like tearing pieces of himself away on each passing shoulder. He can’t stop them. He can’t reach them. They’re trapped so deep inside themselves. Do they even know he’s come to save them? He’s got to save them - God, he just can’t fail them.

When at last he breaks through to the front, though, there’s no Bishop on horseback. There’s nothing at all but open forests in all directions. Empty and all too silent. The calm before the storm.

He turns to face the oncoming tide of smeared banditos and sees Luna’s face first. It’s such a shock - she’s just so infallible, the one person he had believed was somehow untouchable - that he doesn’t hear the boots approaching from behind. Until the rope is already slipped over his head.

In the next moment, the noose pulls taut, and the Torchbearer flies backward until his back hits the dirt. He struggles. Skids across the ground with the sticks and stones ripping through his shirt. Dragged by the neck, he’s struggling to get enough air to think, let alone fight. Then his forward momentum becomes upward momentum.

It’s such a blur that it takes him too long to realize that he’s hanging, suspended from a tree, just close enough to the ground that if he pushes up onto the toes of his boots, he can still breathe. But swaying, struggling to gain balance, it’s almost impossible to manage.

Then the shoulders of the passing masses brush against him, and he goes spinning. Flailing to maintain an ounce of control, he sees a flash of red. A wicked, scythe of a toothy smile. He tries to dig his fingers in between the rough rope and his skin, to buy himself just an inch of room to breathe.

Thunder snaps the air in two, and now the downpour begins. Lightning forks violence across the darkened sky. The Torchbearer feels himself slip. For a few frightful moments, he’s hanging again until he can get his feet back under him.

“Now this is what I call a captive audience.”

Opening his eyes, Torch sees Clancy’s face with the singular red glow of Nico’s seizing power shining in each iris. He had almost managed to forget this particular horror. But it’s just so easy to remember their last dance, the memories crawling back to him. Spiders in his skull.

“You and your friends have managed to cause me quite a lot of trouble recently,” Nico seethes, and Clancy’s antlers are in his hands as he reaches out to tap the end of one to Torch’s chest. The points are sharper than he realized. “So you will forgive me for deciding to keep you on such a short leash.”

He gestures up to the noose, smiling wide.

Torch chokes on his words, and already the edges of his vision are fading to black.

“Oh, come now, Torchbearer, you know how to fight this.” Nico pushes the end of the antler beneath Clancy’s chin, the delicate skin threatening to give way beneath those sharp bones. “Or maybe you think Arrow was right, hm? Has Clancy finally outlived his usefulness?”

Before he can continue, something bowls Nico over from behind. Clothed in the black garb of the island, the Torchbearer’s projection tries to rip the antlers from his hands. Writhing wild and reckless, seemingly no longer afraid to damage this vessel, Nico swings an antler for Torch’s eyes.

But Torch seizes his wrist in time, the antlers poised just to the left of his eye. He manages to twist Clancy’s arm behind his back despite the way the rain makes his skin slick. He pins his hand back between his shoulders where the pain will spark bright. Maybe snap him awake before it snaps a bone.

“Clancy, fight it!” He shouts into his ear, thunder growling up above, and scrambles to grasp the other hand that threatens to plunge the second antler into his side. “I know you can, please!”

Meanwhile, his real body is fading fast. The ground beneath his boots has turned to slick mud, and the strain of running has made his legs tired. He doesn’t think that he can hold himself up for much longer. Everything is growing dim. And the longer he’s trapped here, the further away the banditos are marching.

“There’s no fighting this. That’s what I want to show to you at last, if you’ll only see,” Nico hisses as Torch finally catches his other arm and pins Clancy’s chest against the trunk of a tree. “You remind me of a boy who fought to save my soul once, and do you know what I did to him in the end?”

Torch grits his teeth. He’s close to tearing one of Clancy’s arms from its socket, but he’s got to get him to drop the antlers, to stop the march. “Are you trying to save me from the same fate? Or do you just get lonely locked away in your tower like the coward you are?”

Lightning illuminates the red in Clancy’s eyes as they roll back to peer at Torch.

“I want to propose a truce,” Nico strains against him, but he won’t drop his weapons. And he knows that Torch won’t break Clancy. As much as he might be tempted for the sake of causing Nico pain. “Your last chance to save your friends and walk away unscathed.”

An altogether different explosion of light flickers on either side of Torch’s vision, and he knows that he’s running out of time. But his lips are trembling blue, eyes cast in the direction of his banditos. Of Luna and safety and Trench.

“Give me what is rightfully mine, and I will leave you and yours to your own devices. Once and for all. Take your precious continent. The city of Dema is all I truly care for.”

It would be a lie to say he isn’t tempted. That the clear cry of safety doesn’t resonate down to his bones. He could save these people who have come to mean so much to him, his family, the ones that have always protected him and stood by his side. The love they give has never required his life of him. Never asked more than that he wear their colors with pride.

And Luna is right, he can’t pretend to measure out how many of them are worth sacrificing to save just one soul.

But he can’t give up on Clancy either. For better or worse, he won’t.

With what’s left of his breath, he’s pleading, “Clancy, I know you’re stronger than him. I know you can hear me. You don’t belong to him. Please fight.”

He watches Clancy’s head bow forward. And the body beneath him groans, “I’m so tired,” and Torch truthfully doesn’t know whose voice it is.

He doesn’t know who he’s speaking to as he whispers, just above the sound of the rain, “We’re almost done fighting. Almost to the end now.” But he’s losing his hold, losing his balance, hanging from a string, and the projection flickers.

“There is no end,” comes the sigh, bitter and full of thorns that catch on all the tattered edges. “It’s the one thing neither you or Keons ever understood. There isn’t a way to stop this from going on and on, and it never stops hurting.”

Then the serrated edge returns to his voice, scraping away all sense of doubt. “But just remember, Torchbearer, I gave you your chance.”

Clancy shoves backward, taking Torch by surprise, and the moment his arms are free, Nico makes a move to bury the antlers into Torch’s chest. But it’s like the momentum never follows through. Instead, he wilts to his knees. The antlers fall from his fingers. Twitching and twisting, his whole body shudders.

And Clancy’s eyes clear for just a moment, a flicker of familiar golden brown. Fire in the wind, the glow in his irises flashes through the rain. His hands rise to either side of his head.

“Go away, go away, go away,” with every iteration of the words, over and over like a prayer, he rocks himself back and forth. Over and over getting louder and louder until he’s screaming so hard Torch thinks he’ll rip his vocal chords to shreds. Until it shakes his body and the rain and the sky to its core. “Leave me alone, leave me alone, just leave me alone!”

Everything goes dark in the Torchbearer’s vision. Until he feels a snap and hits the ground hard.

Clancy’s hands fumble with the knot of the noose, to loosen it and throw it off. He can barely stand to touch it, though the memory of his own hands winding and tying it will never leave him. Never let him sleep again. He searches Torch’s blank face for signs of life.

“Please breathe, please breathe,” he begs him and looks back to see the blue-lipped projection flickering through the rain like a ghost, like a dead thing, unexpressive and unmoving and unreal.

Clancy shakes him by the shoulders. “Josh?”

But then Clancy sees his eyes rolling back and forth behind his eyelids, and the next moment, Torch takes a bruised breath in. Vision swimming, he peers up at Clancy still looking dazed. But he has the audacity to give an adrenaline-drunk smile.

“You did it that time. You fought him off.” His voice is crushed and all but ruined, but Clancy’s never heard anything so beautiful in his entire life.

He gives a shake of his head, eyes full of tears hidden by the rain already streaking down his face. “Too close, it was too close. I almost-” But the victory, however narrow, still feels like lightning in his brain.

Torch tries to swallow, straining slightly against the necklace of red and purple in his skin. “The others?”

When Clancy glances up, he can see them all returning with Luna at their lead. The ashen dash marks of a Bishop’s fingers slowly washing away drop by drop.

“They’re okay,” Clancy sighs, feeling relief wash away the rest of his energy. The fever-pitch fright of the battle has left him hollow. “We’re okay.” He bends forward to rest his forehead on Torch’s chest, feeling a hand reach up to brush his back.

“We’re okay, we're okay, we're okay.”

Chapter Text

When they inform his family that he’s been taken off the roster for the Assemblage, they assume it’s because Tyler has done something wrong. And it becomes easy to slip without notice from under their gaze, which he does quite frequently in those days. Their disappointment only serves to drive the knife of living further in.

The name change comes after. Every official record altered, even his prayer books are swapped so that his new name is printed inside, so that even in the quiet moments of his heart, only Clancy exists. Aside from the usual services, he is often taken under Keons’ wing for private lessons apart from his peers. Isolated more each day. Though his Bishop’s authority is all too frequently usurped by the man they call Blurryface.

He comes to know Nico’s rage quite intimately.

And on the day that he’s informed he will be leaving the city for one of his lessons, Tyler fears that he won’t be returning. That he won’t be granted the death of a Dema citizen at all, so far from the memorials of neon gravestones. It shudders through him as they enclose him within the back of the pristine vehicle, black as a hearse. A broken promise of freedom from this pain.

Nico drives him out to the shore. It’s the first time that he becomes acquainted with the waters that border their continent like a roaring gray monster, breaking against the rocks as if it will some day crawl up from its pit to crush them all beneath those angry waves. A beautiful and terrifying force, laid to rest under a placid, overcast Dema sky.

Nico takes him by the hand and leads him into the water so that they stand in the frigid pull up to their waists, the Bishop’s robe trailing behind him across the surface of the waves. Tyler shivers as the chill envelopes him and steals what little warmth his heart can still produce these days. He wants to break away, flee for the rocky shore, and disappear where no one will ever find him again.

He wants to drown beneath the waves and end this today.

“Has Keons ever spoken to you of the ritual of baptism, my child?” Nico asks in low tones, dulcimer as the sea itself.

Tyler’s arms cling tightly around himself as he fends off the cold. “N-no, not in much- much detail.”

Nico’s fingers trail through the water, scattering errant drops as he raises his hand again. “It is, in essence, a picture of death, you know. Sometimes vialism asks that we make sacrifices for the greater good, and that is what I have come to show you today.”

He turns to Tyler then with a facsimile of amusement in his voice. “Surely you must wonder why we Bishops preach the freedom and glory of death and yet we have persisted to such an old age.”

Tyler’s head bows forward, shoulders hunched. “It is not my place to question such things.”

The hand that lifts his chin is even colder than death, still with ash dusting the fingertips. “Be honest with me, my child. You have a naturally inquisitive mind. I am not unaware.”

Swallowing, Tyler tries to stop his teeth from chattering too badly as he speaks. “I have… sometimes wondered.”

Nico gives him an approving nod. “Of course, you have. It is odd, is it not? But allow me to put a thought into your mind, my child. There is more than one way to put to death the old self and be renewed. When I was a little older than you are now, I nearly drowned in these waters.”

He turns his face to the waves then, eyes closed as though wistful at the memory, but the thought terrifies Tyler as much as it thrills him. “And in a way, I let a man die in this strait, so that a new one could emerge. Stronger. Unafraid.”

Dipping his hands into the water, he raises them cupped to his face and splashes it onto his skin. It makes the paint on his face run in places; white and black mixes into a confusion of gray. Beneath it all, there is a surprising shock of human flesh, as real and alive as Tyler’s. A man and not a monster, after all. Or somehow both at once.

“That is what I want you to do today, my child.” Nico reaches for his hand again, drawing him further into the waves until they tickle up his sides to his chest. “A form of death. One that may free you from the fear of pain that seeks to control you, so that you can serve an even greater purpose.”

Gooseflesh covers Tyler’s arms and neck as the Bishop’s hands poise to lean him back into the water. He realizes, looking into Nico’s eyes, that this may be the one person who understands him. Monster and man at once. Who does not turn away from the pain in Tyler’s heart and mind.

He is not kind, but Tyler fears him. And to fear is to love, in a way.

“Okay,” he whispers.

Nico’s mouth raises into a rigor mortis smile. “Do you trust me?”

With the icy waters splashing against his back, Tyler knows that Nico could push him under this water and end it all. He doesn’t know that he would have it in him to fight back. But he trusts Nico’s rage, that kept him alive on what Tyler thought would be his final day. He trusts Nico’s hate, for whatever he sees in Tyler that he calls by another name.

It is the chiefest of sins to lie to a Bishop.

“I trust you.”

With one hand on the back of his head, and another careful on his waist, Nico begins to dip Tyler back. And he allows himself to relax into the hold, into the freezing waters, as his head sinks down beneath the waves. Everything goes peaceful and quiet beneath the surface. The water holds him sweetly, even as it tears away the last of his body heat, sinking cold into his bones, marrow deep.

Nico leaves him under just long enough for his lungs to begin to burn, just long enough for him to wonder if this is it, if he was wrong after all. Just long enough for the monster inside of him to writhe with a mad desire to fight.

Before he’s lifted up again into the open air.

After his baptism, Clancy begins to wander the city during his free time. Not aimlessly, not exactly. It’s never a conscious decision. But when he allows his feet to carry him someplace, he always ends up close to the wall. Wondering about what more there is on the other side of it.

In his dreams, he still fantasizes of sinking into frozen waters. He still thinks of running and running and disappearing somewhere far away. Forgotten and alone. But free. But in waking, he comes to understand how impossible those things are for him to ever reach. Yet, he always finds himself here again.

He’s been warned about how rough the city can be this far out from the towers, how the buildings here crumble to pieces and the people and animals that comb the debris are hard and violent. But he can’t help his dreaming. He can’t deny the craving.

So when he sees the dogs, he’s too curious for his own good. Fascinated by them and their wildness and not yet afraid of things that love the chase. But he would soon learn.

Fleeing is altogether different than he thought it would be. The first time that he runs like his life depends on it, something shatters inside of him that doesn’t ever fit together quite right again. That kind of fear, like shrapnel healed over and hidden inside his heart, continues to worm its way deeper every time he repeats this one moment.

Hunted down by things with sharp teeth.

But from atop that tumbling-down wall, he spies a figure in the distance, sees the moment that they realize what’s happening. And he wonders if they will pass him by. Let the city’s need for violence play out as it has a thousand times.

He’s saved, instead, by a streak of fire through the sky. Shattered glass and a roar of heat so intense that it knocks the breath from his lungs. It’s beautiful and terrible, too. Violence the likes of which he’s only known from the hands of Bishops. Turned into a weapon to protect.

The boy that drags him down from the wall is frightening and rough and strange. Fire at his fingertips, alive like no one he’s ever met before. And Clancy feels again that urge to run. To bare his teeth and bite back, to show he isn’t scared of the pain.

But he’s met with kindness, a little rough as it may be around the edges but real, genuine kindness. It’s like a waking dream.

It’s a boy carrying him somewhere safe. It’s careful, calloused fingers bandaging his injured ankle. It’s a shared bed and the first good night of sleep he’s known in such a long time.

It’s so many days spent wondering when the pain would come only to receive gentleness again and again and again at every turn. It’s a dream of honor and a righteous cause. It’s music in the stolen moments and forgotten places. It’s one, incredible act of rebellion that blows the world wide open. It’s being saved, over and over, by a love he doesn’t feel he will ever deserve.

It’s coming alive at last.

Clancy shivers in his wet clothes within his private tent. Sitting on the edge of his cot bowed over his knees, he tries to settle his frightened heart back inside his rib cage. The storm outside still rages, and he’s not convinced his tent won’t rip away in the next gust of wind. Just right now, he misses the security of concrete walls.

When he hears the tent flap move aside, he flinches in on himself, but soon enough, Torch is kneeling in front of him, his yellow bandana pulled up beneath his chin to hide the bruises on his throat. A comforting hand on Clancy’s knee.

He searches Torch’s face a moment, hands trembling where they rub up and down his arms pressed tight to his chest. “Do I have to leave?”

“They’re still discussing it,” Torch whispers. He can’t raise his voice much above that, and he’s been told by their camp physician to keep the talking to a minimum until the swelling goes down, even though he’d like to be in the meeting tent right now speaking on Clancy’s behalf.

He gives a weak smile anyway. “They thought it would be best if I weren’t there when they take the final vote, so I figured I’d check in.”

Hearing this, Clancy folds inward again. They’re going to turn him out of the camp, he knows it. Luna explained it all to him very calmly not long after they returned. For the good of the unit, she would hear out both sides and allow for a vote. The rules for such a scenario are clear: when the camp feels threatened by one of their members, the vote in their favor must be unanimous.

Anything less and he’ll be forced to leave.

“Maybe it’s for the best- Right? I should just go back to the island, where I’ll do the least amount of damage.” Clancy stares wide-eyed down at his muddy boots, thinking of Nico’s words on his tongue. He hides his mouth in the crook of his elbow, mumbling into the fabric, “’m just a liability now.”

Torch frowns up at him, though Clancy isn’t meeting his gaze. He’s not sure what to say in this moment, and his voice is in tatters anyway.

Tapping the back of Clancy’s hand where it rests over the soaked sleeve of his coat, he gains the other man’s attention and pulls him from his spiral of thoughts. Torch then hooks one finger beneath his palm to ask further permission. Slowly, brow furrowed, Clancy lets him take his hand, and Torch turns it over and uses his thumb to brush back Clancy’s fingers so that he can lace his own between them.

“Come on.” He pushes himself up from the ground with a soft grunt.

They’re both tired, covered in aches and bruises. But when are they not these days?

But he pulls Clancy to his feet, feeling the dead weight behind the hand in his. Feeling the reluctance of someone who has lost this fight before. Knowing they have further to go and knowing that Clancy is growing weary of the journey.

“Let’s get out of here.”

Clancy looks up to see a spark of mischief in Torch’s eyes. “Can we? What if they find out I’m gone?”

Torch shrugs his shoulders, tugging Clancy towards the entrance to the tent. “What’re they gonna do? Kick you out?” He nods his head away, out there towards the wide world. Somehow smiling.

“I can’t be alone-” Clancy protests, feeling panicked suddenly.

But Torch just shakes his head. “You won’t be.” Then they’re out in the rain again.

The worst of the storm has blown past, so the rain is little more than a whisper in the trees. Everything has gone green and blurred at the edges, the whole world smudged by the hand of the storm clouds. Running all the lines together into something soft and sweet and distinctly spring.

As they walk, the clouds roll themselves apart so that handfuls of blue sky begin to peek through.

Clancy chews his lip as he struggles to keep pace with Torch. His thoughts are still snagged on nooses hung from trees and the smooth crush of ash between his fingers.

“When Nico was in my head this time, when he said those things about Keons- I saw his memories of Keons when they were young.” Inside himself, he struggles against the way, even warped by Nico’s darkness, those memories were still tinted with rose. “He really was a lot like you.”

Torch turns his face to listen, though he can guess the path of Clancy’s thoughts. As it often does, that path mirrors his own, the forest of his mind overgrown with worries. Grass tread down into dust by the pacing of many heavy footsteps, their fears have become aligned over time.

“But when Nico started to turn into something dangerous, Keons couldn’t-” Clancy grits his teeth against the surge of raw emotion that doesn’t belong to him so much as it does to Nico, vestiges of the Bishop in his soul. “He had the chance to stop Nico before it was too late, and he didn’t take that chance when he should have.”

Knowing what is coming next, Torch shuts his eyes against the blow.

“If I become something like that, you can’t make the same mistake.”

But Torch just shakes his head and rasps, “You won’t become him.”

Wiping a sleeve across his face, Clancy huffs without humor in his voice, every word a dagger, “That’s exactly what Keons told Nico right before they murdered their predecessor.”

He turns towards Torch then, rain soaked hair and shoulders and skin pink with the exertion of their walk. He’s going to be sick- they both are. Trekking through empty forest when they should be warming up by a fire. But somehow this feels more pressing. Like a different kind of sickness is creeping up on Clancy, threatening to claim his mind as well as his body.

“I need to know we won’t repeat their mistakes. I need you to promise me that we won’t become like them, whatever it takes.”

Torch continues to tug him along by their interlocked fingers, though he can feel Clancy’s trying to slide away. His careless, bone-weary smile is sharp as a canine’s tooth. “I told you, the antlers, the seizing, none of this is forever.” He swallows, wincing as he does. “One last fight, and then we can lay this all down.”

Finally, Clancy tugs his hand away, his voice dropping away in defeat, “You don’t understand, if I kill him now, I’ll just live to see him in someone else’s eyes. And this whole thing starts over.”

Frowning, Torch looks back at him. He doesn’t know what that means, and Clancy’s eyes are too distant. There’s no explanation coming now. Not from wherever he’s trapped at this moment.

But Torch didn’t bring him out here to rehearse their deepest fears. He peers ahead of them and knows they’re close. He puts out his hands to catch Clancy’s shoulders and hold him in place.

“Do you trust me?” he asks, head tilted sideways, enough of a wounded smile left to make that light in his eyes look a little dangerous.

Clancy gulps, wants to say - completely, inerrantly, except for the way you still trust me, do you still trust me? - but instead, he only nods. There’s no point in lying.

Torch’s smile sharpens further into his fire-in-a-bottle, full-faced grin. “Shut your eyes then.”

And hesitating only a second, Clancy does. He’s not sure what he expects, but it isn’t the way that Torch’s arms sweep him off his feet, literally. Yelping, hands grasping and arms looping around Torch’s shoulders, his eyes flash open for just a moment on instinct. He catches just a snatch of Torch’s laughter over the pounding blood in his ears.

The suspense nags in his gut, playing off the anxiety that’s claimed his chest since he woke this morning, but he isn’t left to wait for long. Because when the thump-thump of Torch’s boots finally ceases, there’s only a sway back and forth, once twice three times, and then Torch pitches him.

Out into open air.

And then Clancy is falling.

He’s flailing.

He has just long enough to release a sharp, terrified scream.

Punctuating his growing sense of fear, driving it out of him in one rush.

Before his back breaks the water, and he plunges underneath the surface.

He sinks like a rock, down and down and down.

It’s so quiet, almost peaceful, the way the water just holds him.

And he could continue to sink, or he could swim.

Something digs in. Something rages.

He kicks for the surface and when his head breaks the water, air rushing into his lungs, he hurls that rage up into the sky, “Asshole!”

Torch is cackling from up above, hands on his belly, shaking. Then he’s kicking off his boots and backing up a few steps, and Clancy has to dive out of the way as Torch plunges into the pond after him. The waves rock over him. Water in his nose, but he’s treading now and tipping his head back to float.

When Torch comes back up again, he shakes the water from his hair only for Clancy to hurl a wave of water into his face. Sputtering, Torch kicks a few feet away, but the smile on his face is still unmistakable.

“Better?” he asks as his arms stroke on either side to guide him back.

And Clancy realizes that he does feel better, like that one bright moment of fear was enough to purge the rest of Nico’s ink from his lungs. Burned up in an instant. He hums softly, stretched out on the water.

“Better.”

Then he has an idea, fleeting flash of an afterthought, but it seems right. Clancy presses every last bit of air from his lungs, pulls his arms back in against his torso, and lets himself sink down again. Bubbles drift up from his nostrils, breathing out and out until there’s nothing left.

He’d like to let his fears die away, leave them here at the bottom of this lake where they can drown and rot into sludge and scum far from the light of the sun. Because he’s stronger now than he thought he was. Nico isn’t his lord and master anymore. Just a puzzle in need of solving, a needle beneath his fingernail that needs removing.

And he could do it - he believes that now, really believes it maybe for the first time. It’s only a matter of when, only a matter of how.

But at this moment, all Clancy really needs to conquer is his own heart.

The burning in his chest, scrape of sharp claws up his ribs, his body screams for air. He denies it what it craves. Sinking further, pushing to see just how long he can go, how much of that fear of death he can shed away. Darkness closing around him as the light slips from behind his eyes.

He’s taken by surprise when a pair of hands grab him and yank him upward. All the gravity and pressure of life come hurtling back on him as he’s pulled back to the surface. Gasping for air, sweet with spring, a kindly offering from the world, the promise of a new day.

“Idiot, I didn’t bring you here so you could drown yourself,” Torch is hissing in his ear, but Clancy’s shock turns quickly into giddy laughter. Torch frowns at him - all that valiant concern written into his brow - probably wondering if he’s finally lost it completely.

Clancy blinks tears from his eyes, not sure if they’re from joy or pain. Probably both. “I’m okay.” Once he catches his breath, he knows it’s true. “Better,” he adds. “I feel better.”

Rolling his eyes, Torch drags him towards the shore. Where the sun has well and truly returned now. It breaks down through the trees in shafts of gold, warm to the touch. They’re both shivering.

They find Torch’s boots, make the long walk back in a comfortable silence, and for now at least, Clancy isn’t afraid. Luna is there, skulking outside Clancy’s tent. She’s all fury and storm clouds until she sees their stupid grins. Both of them still soaked to the bone.

“It’s hard enough keeping one of your pinned down, but now I’ve got to contend with both of you at once?” She rolls her eyes upward, muttering an old vialist prayer with such scathing sarcasm that Clancy can’t help but wince. Expecting lightning to strike her.

Torch, on the other hand, seems to find another meaning in her words. “He can stay?”

One eyebrow ticking up, Luna fends off a smile as her eyes flicker to Clancy’s face. “You’re the only person I know who has ever gone toe-to-toe with the head Bishop and come out on top. I figure that was enough to win them over.”

Clancy is dumb with shock. Somehow he hadn’t expected that things would actually be okay - that the banditos might see what happened today as a sign he’s not as much of a losing dog as they may have first assumed.

Luna jerks a thumb back toward the meeting tent. “And if you two crazy kids want to get into something dry, maybe we can have an honest conversation about how we’re going to win this thing.”

Chapter Text

This story was never about the Torchbearer, and he knows it. As much as he has suffered and bled for it, as much as he has driven it along with his own two hands and the marching beat in his heart. The narrative belongs to someone else, as does the ending. He is little more than a useful tool, a blunt instrument of necessary violence.

The word of Clancy’s victory over Nico’s seizing spreads like wildfire. Torch ensures it with every breath. Every night he falls asleep in a tent in Trench and wakes to walk the city streets. He whispers this secret and stokes the flame.

And when Clancy makes his appearances to the throngs of frenzied believers, Torch is willing to place himself between each fragile impermanent vessel and the city of desperate people in need of a savior, if that’s what it takes.

Because Clancy has become something sacred now.

Someone beyond even the Torchbearer’s reach.

The citizens whisper his name like a prayer, and the more zealous swear oaths by it. They reach out to touch him, even just a brush of fingers across his coat, as he passes through the masses. Sometimes a touch is not enough, though, and they grab hold like they might pull him apart.

And from his place behind him, always behind now and never before, the Torchbearer sees the way that Clancy flinches away from each grasping hand. But he’s the miracle walking in their midst. He’s their saint with dirty hands and a heavy heart.

But this is what Clancy was always meant to be. Doomed from the start, either way.

“I want to start by reminding everyone that this is not a war council.” Luna smooths both her hands over the map of their territory, precious and painstaking. Drawn by Arrow over his years and years of freedom. Lovely in its complexity but somehow vaster than they bargained for.

“What we’re planning here isn’t meant to start a fight; it’s meant to finish one. And if we fail to do that, we can’t fool ourselves into thinking we’ll come out on top in a real war of attrition.”

She glances around the table, the four seats beside her own, and leans back to stand at her full height.

“I’m talking about one strategy, one battle, one chance. That means we have to make it count.”

Then her gaze slides sideways to the Torchbearer, and he stands to take the floor from her.

“What we’re proposing is a large-scale frontal assault against the eastern gate. We want to make it look like we plan to take the gate and storm the city.” Torch gnaws the inside of his cheek, tasting blood.

No mask will hide him from the Bishops’ eyes then. They will all be exposed. They will all be putting their necks on the line.

“But while we distract them here,” fingertips to the map, tapping out the path to the gate, “a smaller team will infiltrate silently from here.”

Trace of calloused fingers across the page, he denotes the storm drain where he and Clancy first escaped. Their initial act of rebellion. It seems appropriate, ending where they started.

“All reports from the inside say that the Bishops have taken to the central tower,” Matteo offers, a pair of heavy headphones hang from his neck, their cord spinning loose from one hand where it would normally be plugged into one of his radios. It’s like he had to unplug just to show up to the meeting.

“So, all you really need to do is get inside, right? My unit is working on some low-level explosive devices. Could just bring the whole thing down.”

Luna shakes her head. “You risk injuring citizens. We don’t know how many others are in there with them. I’d never put it past a Bishop to use the citizens as shields.”

“I suppose you mean to lead this team then,” Arrow offers, an eyebrow raised at the Torchbearer.

But Torch just shakes his head. “I can’t. I’m a symbol.”

Arrow scoffs, and Torch needs to take a breath to ignore him.

Don’t let the fire through.

“If they don’t see me on the front line, they’ll know something is wrong.” Torch avoids Clancy’s gaze from across the tent, though he can feel it burning into his skin.

“I’ve been purposefully goading the Bishops for the last few weeks. Years, if we’re being honest. And they know of my connection to Clancy. If anything is going to bait them into turning all their attention on a single engagement-”

He traces his fingers over his tape, X marks the spot.

“It’s me.”

“You’re willing to risk capture?” Matteo asks. His fingers drum a nervous heart beat onto the table. “Because we certainly can’t ensure your safety.”

Torch shrugs his shoulders, though they are heavy. “You never could. And I’ve never asked.”

The only noise in the tent then is the groan of Clancy’s chair as he leans his elbows onto his thighs. Torch still can’t look at him. But no one is arguing, at least.

Arrow clears his throat, tapping a capped pen to the map. “Who then? Who escorts our little Bishop to the Towers?”

“I want it to be you.” Torch meets his eye when Arrow’s shocked gaze ratchets up to the Torchbearer’s face. The look of surprise brings a certain briny taste of satisfaction. “If anyone deserves a chance to spill blood, it’s you and yours.”

“No.”

And it’s Clancy’s first word since they entered the tent, and it sounds like it had to be extracted from his jaw like a rotten tooth. “No, no one should have to face the Bishops except me. I’m the only one who stands a chance. You’d be sending them into a slaughter.”

“And going alone isn’t a suicide mission?” Luna asks, detached. It’s a good thing she does, Torch’s voice is tangled somewhere behind his eyes. “Nine of them against one of you.

“Eight,” Clancy corrects her. “And it’s the only way I’ll go. Alone or not at all.”

Torch reaches blindly behind him for his chair and sinks into it. He should have seen this coming.

“You cannot possibly be so selfish to make that kind of demand right now!” Arrow snaps, but he won’t repeat his violence from before. Won’t even take a step closer to Clancy’s chair.

He knows better now. Fear of pain has never stopped Clancy before, and it won’t now. Certainly not with his guard dog in the room.

“Think of it this way,” Clancy offers with total finality in his voice - there is no other way to consider it, just this - “It’s the lowest cost for the most gain. If nothing else I’ll be able to take a few of them out and I won’t be a problem for you anymore. And this way, you won’t have to risk any of your banditos getting caught in the crossfire.”

“No offense,” Matteo says once Clancy’s pronouncement has had the time to settle, “but what’s to stop Nico from seizing you and turning this back on us?”

Torch can only raise his gaze to the level of Clancy’s mouth, to a rueful, wicked smile that would never betray his mind.

He says, “I’ve got a city full of converts who are ready to follow a martyr. They’ll have one, even if they have to do the killing themselves.”

“Where are you at right now?” Clancy asks as he sidles up to the Torchbearer near the edge of camp.

Staring off into the shadows, Torch is not allowed to say, I am hanging by the noose your hands tied for me. He is not allowed to say, I am kindling sparks for the pyre my hands built for you. We’re not saving each other, are we? Just killing each other slowly.

Instead, he smiles and lies, “I’m right here.”

And Clancy must want to believe him because he doesn’t press the issue, just lets his head fall against Torch’s shoulder. It sends a jolt of memory through Torch’s chest, of hungry red eyes and the empty faces of his friends marching to their death.

“Ready to go?” Clancy asks him, his voice already drifting. Hands fluttering like nervous birds.

But because the Torchbearer loves him, he will never tell Clancy how he wants to flinch away from him.

And he lies, “Yes, I’m ready.” And they leave the camp together with two different kinds of treason in their hearts.

The sea of frenzied faces comes alive, broken eyes and pleading mouths. Blackened hands reaching out for their Bishop. Desperate for him.

He wades into the crowd.

The crush of bodies presses all around them. Torch tries his best to keep them all back, but his arms alone aren’t enough to hold off the masses. Bitten-down fingernails clawing at undead skin. If there was blood left to spill from the vessel, they would have it. He’s never seen a hungrier pack of vultures.

For a moment, he loses sight of Clancy. He loses that grounding touch, a handful of his jacket to keep him near. Someone pried his hand away, he thinks.

“Move!” Then he’s shoving bodies aside to make a path through them, even as they’re all pressing in closer and tighter.

Fervent worship of the starving soul.

When he finally reaches Clancy again, it takes all of the Torchbearer’s substantial might to drag them out again and onto the stage. Here, at least, they find the refuge of an island in the storm. Here, the citizens will not trespass into such a place of divine authority.

“They’re just hurting,” Clancy whispers into his ear when Torch guides him shaking to the pulpit. Weak knees and a distant gaze. “Don’t hold it against them.”

They have never been so long without the guidance of their Bishops.

“Is this going to be enough?” Sol asks him as they sit together in the vestibule of this concrete sanctuary while beyond the door Clancy speaks. The empty service tunnel echoes with his voice, but neither of them have the stomach for his words tonight.

Sol’s hands are shaking again. “Tell me this is enough. Tell me I don’t have to do this much longer.”

“They know that it’s almost over,” Torch whispers and hopes that it’s true.

All reports confirm: the Bishops have taken to their Tower and locked the doors. No one has seen them in weeks, though there are rumblings from their loyalists of preparations being made. They must know. Perhaps they sit now around a table awaiting their last supper, gorging on a final few souls. Fattened for their sacrifice.

“Any day now,” Sol murmurs in agreement, with a thin attempt at hopefulness. Though the note rings falsely. Even in this utilitarian light, she can almost maintain the mask, her perfect, sunny disposition.

Did she have to look in a mirror and push each tiny muscle into position? Hold it there, just so, with all her might?

But when she reaches to add another file to the growing stack in the corner of the room, he sees her sleeve draw up to reveal the lines cut into soft skin. Torch’s heart nearly stops. He opens his mouth, as if to say something that will fix it. Nothing will fix it. He’s a liar anyway.

“It’s just to stay awake,” she tells him as she tugs the sleeve back into place. “The dreams are worse than anything else. In my dreams I’m back in Trench.”

Her eyes are tired. Her hands are stained. Both their necks bear the marks of propping up their broken saint.

“Don’t you dare judge me for this.”

“No,” he says and means it, “no, I won’t.”

Besides, he understands the sentiment. He spends all his nights walking in another form so that he won’t be trapped by the night terrors of his friends’ rotting corpses. Burning the candle at both ends.

He wishes he could tell her that he’ll protect her. He would take her out of Dema tonight, if he could. He wants to be that person again, the one who would never have allowed any of this to happen in the first place.

But his hands are tied. They need her on the inside. They can’t do this without someone to supply the bodies. And how that knowledge cuts him down to the bone. He hates himself for this. Will never forgive himself for this.

So he offers all that he can to her. “It’s almost over.”

She’s already rushing out the door.

Torch sinks into himself, trapped within a cage of his own making. Until he hears the sound of a strangled noise outside the door and bolts to his feet. Out in the narrow maintenance hall, the glow of the red utility bulbs is fire in his retina.

Her halo of hair lit up like a flare in the dark. She stands stock still, both arms limp at her sides.

The boy across from her bares his teeth, the fading dash of a scar along the bridge of his nose.

“Abel.”

Torch hadn’t even meant to say it out loud, but it must have slipped out when he wasn’t breathing because the boy’s magnesium-flash eyes turn on him. His lip curls in a snarl at the red in Torch’s hair.

“I should have known you’d be here.”

He’s got a fistful of Sol’s collar and something metal in his other hand. It catches a glint of scarlet light. And his hateful gaze is on her face again, the anger blossoming into a sharp-toothed rage.

They all know what he’s capable of, and yet Sol looks so resigned to this level of acceptable violence.

Spitting his words, Abel winds his fingers tighter in the limp fabric, “Knew she was still a liar. I knew it! You would betray your city again and again!” He wants a reaction from her that she isn’t willing to give.

Torch raises both his hands, placating, panicking. “Abel, look at me, okay? Let her go. I’m the one you want anyway.”

Flicker of a sideways look, but it’s not enough to hold him.

“She’s the reason this whole city is following after a heretic!” Abel’s gutted words echo into the dark in either direction within this sepulcher. “The reason our Bishops are forced into hiding! It’s all her!”

“She’s just here to drag the bodies around,” Torch snaps, callous as rough hewn rope snapping tight. “We can get anyone to do that. There would be more than enough volunteers eager to please.”

Torch hazards a step closer to them. His own fist thumps against his chest, missing his tape just now. “But you knew if you followed her, you would find me. Right? And you could always trust me. Always follow me.”

Desperate kind of shattered shadow breaking through his teeth, Abel releases a strangled noise like something with a boot on its throat. Nearly silent scream. Body shaking, close to the breaking point, as tears stream one after the next in a swan dive off a cliff.

“Listen to me, they abandoned you,” Torch pleads with him as he tries to inch close enough to pull Sol away from him. “They left you when you needed them the most, after all that you’ve given them. All that you’ve done in their name. They locked themselves away in their Tower while they leave you out here to rot.”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” Abel howls and forces Sol’s back against the nearest concrete wall, glint of metal poised at her neck.

She turns her watery gaze to the Torchbearer in silent plea.

A shiver runs the gambit up Torch’s spine until it’s a bright white pulse at the back of his skull. He shakes out his hands. Readies himself.

“You were willing to kill for them, Abel, and where are they now?”

But before he can act. Before he can move. Something emerges out of the black over Abel’s shoulder, and he’s snatched backwards by the neck. The noise of his choking is so familiar it runs razor blades over the Torchbearer’s already frayed nerves.

Clancy’s stole is wrapped tight around Abel’s throat. White text on black fabric on bruised skin. All of it lit red by the light staring down, the unblinking eye of an angry god.

“You’re the one, aren’t you?” Clancy hisses as he winds the stole tighter around each hand. Poison drips from his mouth. “Did you think you could come here and threaten them again? Did you think I wouldn’t find you after what you did to him? Have the Bishops ever been so merciful to turn a blind eye?”

Gasping, Abel’s fingers scrabble at the edge of the stole, but its hold is absolute. Its fury immense. Unbreaking. And when his eyes roll towards the Torchbearer, full of white and frightened as an animal caught in a snare, Torch finds he is frozen to the spot. Caught in a trap of his own.

They can’t let him go. He’s already seen too much.

With her back still against the wall, Sol regains her composure first. She slides down to lift the little weapon from the floor where it fell from Abel’s fingers. And when she turns it over in her palm, Torch recognizes the shape too well. Just a knife from one of the city’s gray-washed cafeterias. Barely sharp enough to saw through a cut of meat.

“Clancy?” she stammers, stepping closer. Her eyes are still full of un-shed tears. “We can still figure this out- Let’s just- We can talk about this.”

When his eyes cut up to her, the Torchbearer expects to see them red, but that’s just the bulb. That’s just this twisted trick of the light. It’s Clancy’s glare. All his own.

“Talk?” It’s a dry rasp of cold laughter, and Torch is glad he can't see how it mars the vessel's face. "He tried to kill you both!"

Abel’s knees begin to go weak, sinking slowly, until they give out all at once, and even though he’s kneeling, Clancy won’t let up now. He tightens the stole so that his own arms are shaking with the effort. Singular in his motive. This isn’t a penance; it’s an execution.

Torch looks from one face to the other, and he can’t help his confusion. Because Abel looks so much like Clancy, and Clancy - cloaked in his mask and eyes full of rage - looks so much like Nico. This can't be happening. He can't let it happen again.

He rushes him with all the pent-up terror he’d been reserving to fight Abel for the knife, and when they collide, it’s a special kind of betrayal that flashes in Clancy’s eyes. Torch throws him back and feels the snag of the stole tangled around his wrists. He can’t catch himself. And Clancy’s vessel hits the ground hard, the crack of a skull snapping back on pavement. Eyes roll and hands go limp.

If there was blood left to spill from the vessel, Torch would have it.

But there’s not. There’s just the empty silence of a quiet, discarded body and the sound of Abel’s shredded gasps for air.

The Torchbearer looks down at his hands. They don’t feel like they belong to him right now. They feel like they've done all this before, postmortem twitch of muscle memory.

“I’ll take care of him.”

He blinks. And looks back at Sol like he’s lost. But he can’t be, it’s not in his nature. And yet.

Her voice is bitter, no sense in hiding behind a mask now. For either of them. She nods down at Abel, curled at her feet. “Someone has to.”

It’s not fair to her, after everything she's been through, but then again, nothing ever is.

He can’t even bring himself to say good-bye, before he turns and steps away and crosses back into the forests of Trench to confront the sainted and sanctified tenth Bishop of Dema.

Chapter Text

He finds Clancy in his tent, throwing his worldly possessions into a bag like he’s going to run away. It’s such a childish gesture considering the circumstances that Torch could almost forget that he just watched Clancy try to murder someone.

“What do you think you’re doing?” The rumble of his voice is darker than even he was expecting. Sharper, too. He’s in the dangerous position of standing very close to the ledge and across from a man who has never been afraid of heights.

Clancy’s spine goes rigid. He must not have heard the Torchbearer’s approach, but now that he has, the transformation in his body is all too apparent. Like he would disappear from the spot if he could. When his shoulders curl in, Torch is reminded - not for the first time tonight - that if it came down to it, he could overpower Clancy. He thinks he could still kill him, if he had to. If there was no other choice.

“Don’t look at me like that.” Clancy’s eyes are a dark streak of lightning. Blacker here in the low glow of a single lamp and no less frightful for the remaining flecks of sweet, golden brown when the light catches them just right. “Not you, too.”

“Like what?” Torch snaps and crosses the too-small space to snatch at the bag on Clancy’s cot. But his friend’s fist curls in the burlap fabric before Torch can tear it away. Holding it in place.

“Like I’m meat,” Clancy hisses, inches from his face and daring to get closer. He tilts his head at the angle of a mad crescent moon. “You’re looking at me like I’m already dead.”

“Quit acting like it then, if you want me to stop.” Torch pries Clancy’s fingers from the bag and dumps its contents out again. Besides his one change of clothes, a notebook and pens bounce out, along with a handful of dried flowers. He’s still so predictable.

“You only ever try to pick a fight with me when you’re scared,” Torchbearer growls back at him so that each canine glistens in the lamp’s burning halo. “So drop this act and tell me the truth. You surprised yourself tonight, is that it?”

Clancy turns his face away then but doesn’t back down. He shifts his weight from foot to foot, mouth set like he’s half-prepared to bite the next hand that reaches for him.

Torch isn’t afraid of Clancy’s bite, but he’s scared to death of his silence. That’s why he’s not afraid to push further than he should.

He fills his voice with acrid mockery, aware that it’s going to hurt them both. In fact, he’s hoping that it will. “Was it really so hard to imagine that you could have that in you? Please. You’ve always been a little violent.”

Deceptively caustic to the touch, Clancy’s smile could cut concrete, and the eyes that zig-zag up to meet Torch’s again are full of the exposed rebar in the rubble. “I’ve been the target of a Bishop’s punishment more times than I can count. Just didn’t expect how good it would feel to be on the other side of it.”

Now he’s pushing back, chin jutting forward, daring Torch to lash out. They’ve both been needing this. The honesty in anger. When all the walls come down, and they’re forced to be their ugliest selves.

“Don’t act like you care,” Clancy snarls every word. “You want me to kill eight people like it’s nothing. You think just because they’re Bishops that it shouldn’t bother me, right? Because you- you wouldn’t bat an eye. To you, they aren’t even human anymore.”

He’s backing Torch against the writing desk, and the Torchbearer lets him. His eyes remain unaffected, lights out. Two can play at this game.

Clancy blows out a sharp breath. “You’re such a hypocrite. Violence is fine as long as it’s righteous. As long as you can reduce the enemy to something sub-human. But if it’s revenge on the person who tried to carve into your heart? You roll over, show your belly, and only snap your teeth at anyone who would dare to protect you.”

Leaning in, Clancy’s teeth are just as sharp, lamb or lion or both. “I did nothing wrong.”

“He’s a kid,” Torch grumbles.

“He’s a killer!” Clancy pushes the knuckles of his fist against the Torchbearer’s chest, still grinning wide and eyes feverish. He only has a few inches on Torch, but he’s using every one of them to tower over him now.

“That’s what they do in Dema. Turn everyone into a murderer, one way or another. And you and your kind think the Bishops are the only problem! But that sickness is in you, Torch, and it’s in me. Or have you forgotten that I’ve killed someone for you before?”

Torch takes a steadying breath without meaning to, and it’s all Clancy needs to gut him completely.

“His city taught him that lives are meant to be thrown away, and he thought you were dirt. That somehow you deserved to be broken. He would have drowned you and left you for the vultures if I hadn’t stepped in. And he was only a kid, too. Was that a righteous act, Torchbearer? Or do I deserve punishment for that, too?”

Then Clancy’s hand, quick as a rabbit, snatches the switchblade from Torchbearer’s pocket, right where he always keeps it. He flicks it open between them. Rests the tip of it to his chin, frowning and feigning confusion.

“No, you carry the trophy around everywhere you go. Now, why is that, I wonder?”

The mocking look of doe-like innocence on his face nearly makes the Torchbearer’s stony exterior crack. He can still recall the sting on his knuckles and the sight of Clancy spitting out blood. But he manages to hold himself still this time. If only so he won’t give Clancy the satisfaction.

“You’re just now waking up to the fact that I’m not some spotless, sacrificial lamb. Whatever good in me you think you’ve been protecting all this time? It never existed.” Then Clancy feels an itch between his shoulder blades and the mockery in his expression fades away. “I’m not clean, never have been.”

And just like that, the trapdoor swings open and Clancy’s fight goes right out of him.

Without a word, Torch snatches the knife from his hand. Clancy blinks at him, stunned to silence himself. The quiet that descends is suffocating.

“I’m tired of everyone waving knives around,” Torch mutters and closes the blade before throwing the knife down onto Clancy’s desk. “Someone’s going to put an eye out eventually.”

When he turns back, though, Clancy has slipped over to his cot once more, where he gathers up his things. But he doesn’t pack them away. He just holds them, spilling over his arms, like he’s not sure what to do with the debris of his stolen life here in Trench.

Of course he wants to run. It’s all either of them have ever known.

Torch leans both hands back onto the desk with a sigh. “You’re right, I’ve been callous about the Bishops. I should’ve accounted for the fact that they mean more to you than-”

“I still hate them,” Clancy snaps, his back turned. But Torch can just make out the way he brushes a thumb over the dried flowers propped against his notebook. “But it’s not as easy as you think. They’re still human beings, because…”

Because if they aren’t, then neither is Clancy.

“You’re thinking of this like a vialist, weighing sins against penance, and I just want you to be able to live with yourself when this is done.” Torch crosses his arms over his chest, head ducked down but eyes still boring into the back of Clancy’s neck. “I don’t care if your hands are clean. I don’t care if Nico marked you. I only care that you’re still… you. I kept that knife for so many years because sometimes it was all I had left of you.”

He sighs, head falling to the side. “But I never wanted death to be your legacy. Because you’re more than the death you’ve had to swallow- You care about how we win. You care about what it means to the citizens if we destroy any sense of security and order they’ve ever known. All these things the banditos don’t even think to consider, you’ve got hanging around your neck.”

Clancy turns his head to look at him, his brow wrinkled up, fingers fiddling with all his trinkets. Without his spotlight and his pulpit, he really is quite small. Army of one. An idol with a mouth but no breath, with useless stone fingers.

Torch shrugs and rubs his ear nervously against his shoulder. “And I know you, Clancy. You’re trying to push me away now because you think it’ll be easier on me somehow if you-”

He sucks his teeth in frustration. He still can’t say it.

Pinching the bridge of his nose where he can feel a headache forming, Torch sighs, “Just- Can we not do this? We may only have a few days left. I don’t want to spend all of them fighting.”

“It wouldn’t exactly be out of character for us, though, would it?” Clancy asks, toneless and raw. Almost joking, but then- “I don’t want to fight either. That’s why it’s better if I just go.”

The way that he says that word “go” - Torch doesn’t like it.

“The way I see it, in a few days I’ll either have killed the Bishops, or I’ll die in Nico’s arms like I was always supposed to. And no matter which way it goes, I can’t see a version of this where I come back to you in one piece.”

He shrugs. “Even you have to admit, the whole narrative is just so much more convenient if I die. No more Bishops. No more cycles. I take the last of vialism out with me. Just one more martyr and then it’s a clean slate. Besides, the only person who would really miss me is you.”

His words tumble off the edge into silence, those last four words disappearing just as they come into form. When their eyes meet then, it’s a quiet battle of wills, and unfortunately, the Torchbearer is the one to blink first. He’s so tired of being the only one who cares if Clancy lives or dies.

“And you already think I’m half-gone anyway,” Clancy mutters and drops his things back into his bag. “So what’s the point?” He zips it up. There’s a finality to it.

Torch unwinds his arms from across his chest, bracing himself against the writing desk again. “You promised.” The words trip on the tree roots growing up from his throat, and now he’s the one that sounds like a child, crying from a fall and clutching both hands around a skinned knee.

“You swore you’d stay with me. That you’d try.”

Pinning up his smile again, Clancy slides a crippling gaze over his shoulder. “Turns out, I’m a terrible vialist after all. I’ve made so many oaths only to break them in the very next breath. What’s one more?”

Slowly, aching in every fiber, Torch bends forward at the waist like he might vomit up the rest of his emotions onto the floor. It would be preferable, he thinks, to the feeling of them raking their claws through his insides.

“I’m not Nico, and I’m not Keons. I’m not- I’m not perfect, but I don’t want your death either,” he says, every word dripping with sorrow and brokenness and exhaustion. He’s so tired. “And I can’t do this if you’ve already given up. I thought you wanted-”

He’s weaker than he thought he was. Because Clancy is frail and easily broken, but the Torchbearer could never hurt him. Kill him. Not if he’s angry enough to break bones and not if Clancy is dangerous and not even if Clancy asked him to do it. Not for the good of everyone and not for the promise of a world rid of vialism. He can’t, and he won’t, and he hasn’t yet decided whether that’s a disappointment or a relief.

“I thought you wanted a sunny day on the other side of this.”

Clancy doesn’t answer, and he doesn’t move to go, even though there’s nothing stopping him from doing it. Torch won’t. For all that he’s done to keep Clancy alive, he won’t hold him prisoner either. That ship has sailed. He could have left him behind on the island, safe and sound and hating him, but at least Clancy would have lived.

Torch takes the three steps to close the distance and rests his forehead on that spot between Clancy’s shoulder blades. Where the mark is hidden beneath his shirt. And he hooks one finger into Clancy’s sleeve, not to hold him back but just to ask, without words.

“Stop trying to save me from mourning you, it won’t work.” He gives a gentle tug on Clancy’s sleeve, just a small one. Hardly noticeable.

“Come on, Torchbearer. Your mask is slipping,” Clancy mumbles, but his own resolve is fading fast. “You’ve got to be hard and cruel and angry, right? That’s how we win.”

But Torch just shakes his head, still pressed to Clancy’s spine. “Tomorrow.”

Clancy drops the bag onto the cot again. “If I come back,” and “if” is such a big word for only two letters, “and I’m… wrong…”

“Just come back,” Torch whispers, tightening his grip, twisting up the fabric into his fist now. “We’ll figure out the rest from there. Just come back.”

He can feel the way that Clancy swallows the lump in his throat. “They’re going to try to kill you, too.”

But that just shakes a rattling laugh from Torch’s chest. “They’ve been trying for years now. They can’t catch me. Not if I don’t want them to.”

Clancy leans his head back, chin tilted up towards the roof of the tent. “What do you want?”

He wants a lot of things. Things too big to ask for. Too costly.

Torch is tired of the fight. Tired of dragging himself through nightmare-choked streets. He’s tired of forgotten stone chambers filled with dead, filtered air. He is so very tired of tending to a fire that keeps threatening to go out and leave him forever lost in the dark.

“I want,” he whispers and shuts his eyes, “some rest.”

The word tilts up a little at the end, almost like a question. Such a small request, and it still feels beyond what he can bear.

He tugs on Clancy’s sleeve again. “What do you want?”

But he sounds so far away, as he whispers, “Wanting hurts.”

“That’s a cop-out,” Torch grumbles, “try again.”

Clancy chuckles, deep in his throat, barest hint of a smile that flickers in his glassy eyes. “I want… to finish the song I’ve been working on.” His head tips to the side, his bottom lip caught between his teeth. “Do you want to hear it?”

Relief like a breath of fresh air fills Torch’s lungs. “Yeah, I want to hear your song.”

“Okay, lay down.” He turns and moves his bag onto the ground. He hasn’t unpacked it yet, so the possibility of an escape is still there. But it’s set aside for now as he tugs his sleeve from the Torchbearer’s grasp and goes to retrieve his ukulele.

Normally Torch would be too embarrassed to take Clancy’s cot, too worried about what the other banditos would think, but he’s bone-weary. So he stretches himself out on top of Clancy’s quilt, the side of his face pressing into the pillow. When Clancy sits down on the edge of the cot, the metal complaining beneath both their weight, Torch slips a finger through one of his belt loops. Just to be sure, just in case he gets any ideas.

“I- I don’t have all the words figured out yet, but maybe the music will help you sleep.” Clancy’s head is tucked down, chin to chest, while his hands fret along the instrument’s wooden body.

He starts to play. The tune is plucked out of a sky set ablaze, not by the threat of the storm but by its passing, by the promise of a sunrise or maybe the sigh of a sunset. It’s the distant drumming of ocean waves that swoon and swell and whisper secrets. He hums along where the words should be, but those are still formulating in his mind. A story half-told. With the ending yet unwritten.

Torch’s breathing starts to turn slow and sweet. Clancy’s eyes dart down to his bag on the floor. He could go soon, he thinks. Slip away and stay gone. Torch would know how to find him when the time came. And at least between now and then, he wouldn’t be in the way, wouldn’t cause anyone unnecessary pain.

Except for Torch. Clancy can’t stop from hurting him either way.

But at least he can give him one thing.

Clancy sets the instrument aside when the song is done, and he shifts carefully, to lie down where he won’t drive an elbow into Torch’s side or make too much noise. When he lets his head settle on the pillow, he breathes a slow, languid sigh.

Then he feels an arm wrap around him at the middle, and he’s tugged just an inch or two - there really isn’t enough room for them both - so that his spine is pressed to Torch’s chest. A head nestles against his shoulder. He feels a sleepy hum resonate in his own ribs.

“I can go,” Torch offers so soft that Clancy is only certain he’s speaking out loud by the way his breath warms his skin. “I know this can’t be that comfortable.”

But Clancy has never felt more content in his entire life. Torch is warm and safe and- He doesn’t think he could leave now if he tried. “It’s okay.”

And he’s sinking fast, and for once, that feels okay, too.

“Luna told me once, she thinks we’re more dangerous apart than together,” he whispers.

Torch hums again, quieter this time. “Smartest person I know.”

And Clancy lets his eyes slip closed, like they have all the time in the world to sleep and tomorrow won’t come. “Goodnight, Josh.”

Chapter Text

Clancy wakes, groggy and warm. And decidedly not alone, like he’d intended to be the night before. He’s entangled. In more ways than one. Sometime while he was sleeping he must have turned over because now Torch’s chin is level with his forehead, one arm still slung over Clancy’s middle and the other crooked beneath his head, and Clancy is staring at the necklace of bruises on Torch’s throat.

In the low light, he can still make out the oil slick of purple and red and green. They look uglier up close. Torch has been so careful to keep them hidden since the incident, but his bandana has tugged down in the night, leaving them exposed. Clancy has to resist the urge to brush a fingertip over them, thinking - he put those there.

He and the noose he tied.

“You still don’t know how to lace up your boots,” Torch grumbles. He’s been short with Clancy ever since the pine box arrived in camp like a sign from on high. Bearing gifts. Bearing great expectations.

“Maybe I just like making you do it for me every time,” Clancy snaps back, feeling nervous energy crackling under his skin. He wants to chew the flesh off his hands. He wants to jump head first into a cold river. He wants to run and never look back.

Luna appears in his periphery, geared up already and making last minute inspections. She hovers near them, chewing on gum like she’s grinding bones between her teeth.

“Eyes up, you two.” She’s hard as stone today and colder than ice, but there’s a comfort to seeing her so steady. So calm. Like this is just any other morning. Any other blissful walk through Trench.

She reaches out a hand to tap them both beneath the chin. “Don’t do anything stupid. Am I clear?”

It’s the closest she comes to admitting she cares.

Torch gives a stiff two-fingered salute, and Clancy nods. Then Luna’s eyes flick back to the Torchbearer. “You’re leading the way today. We’re ready to move out on your word.”

Clancy glances sideways at him, Torch walled-up behind his mask. Torch with fire in his eyes. Torch on a war path, ready to bring hell with him. And Clancy thinks, not for the first time, that he would follow him anywhere.

Torch turns to the banditos waiting and surveys their nervous, expectant faces. If there is anything to say, it’s already been said. Instead, he turns to Clancy, waiting.

And in that moment, all those wild eyes and lighted flames, they turn to Clancy waiting for their orders, and his chest swells with dread and hope and a hard-won determination to make this the final day he lives in fear of the Bishops of Dema. One way or another.

“Cover me?” he asks, and with one voice, the gathered crowd shouts their agreement to the wakening skies over Trench.

Clancy feels Torch shift, feels his breathing change as he wakes and the sigh of relief as his eyes open.

“You’re still here.” His voice is morning-thick and sleep-slurred, and Clancy feels a wrench of some nameless but distinctly painful emotion somewhere in his chest.

It says, You’re going to hurt this person again and again no matter what you do.

“Yeah,” he says, and when Torch shifts back slightly, his eyes flick up and away from the circle of bruises.

The hand curled against his back slides up to fuss with the bandana, smoothing it back into place over the marks. “Don’t worry. They only look bad.”

Clancy wants to move, but he’s afraid if he does, he’ll fall off the edge of the cot. Though, it might be preferable, all things considered. Instead, he shuts his eyes again so he can pretend he has more space than he does. That he’s not taking advantage of Torch’s undying kindness.

He feels a finger tap softly on his shoulder. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

Wiping a hand over his face, Clancy mumbles, “I’m thinking I’d like to fall off this cot and hit my head.”

“Okay,” Torch huffs, and Clancy can feel it against his forehead, “well, don’t do that. What else are you thinking?”

He grinds his teeth. He doesn’t want to play this game. “I’m thinking we both smell, and I miss warm showers.”

Another amused huff, and this time Torch tugs Clancy’s beanie down to his nose again. “Welcome to living outdoors, but you’re right, I do miss indoor plumbing. Like a lot.” He yawns and shifts again, stretching. “One more, this time tell me what’s really bothering you.”

Clancy gnaws on the inside of his cheek a moment, and his eyes rest on the bandana - colorless in a way that makes his eye twitch - that smells of sweat and smoke and flammable things. “I’m thinking… that I always assumed when we reached this point, that I would know for sure that I wanted to live. No matter what.”

He swallows, but the words stick in his throat. They won’t go back down. And they don’t stop coming either. They just keep spilling out.

“I thought that when I got to this moment, I’d be… better. But I’m thinking that maybe there’s a chance that I fight Nico, and I win, and I live, and I’m still-”

He tucks his head down, ashamed to admit it.

“I’m still not happy. The sun will rise, and I’ll still be broken and self-destructive and wrong. I’ll still be me, and all of it will be for nothing.”

“Eyes up!” Someone warns. “We’ve got vultures!”

And all around, the banditos stop to gaze at a sky choked with black-winged birds. So many it could blot out the sun.

Clancy’s hands twitch for the antlers at his side, carved down to the finest of points, but Torch just places a hand on his arm.

“Let them see,” he says in a voice like the crush of an avalanche. “Let them know we’re coming for them.”

And Clancy obeys without thought. This is why he wore red. This is why he made sure the Bishops would not miss him in the crowd. He wants to burn into their minds, a splinter in their eye.

When they reach the city, a field of makeshift torches awaits them, each clutched in the hands of the glorious gone.

As they stare down the coming army of the dead, Clancy is tempted to ask the Torchbearer one last time if he’s sure. He would give the whole world for one last desperate embrace. One last whispered promise that they’re going to make it. One last chance to cling to the person that has moved heaven and earth to bring him here.

To his own divinely-appointed devastation.

But for all that Clancy loves him, beyond the words that even a rebel poet can pen, the Torchbearer is all armor now. Locked away someplace deep inside himself. And any attempt to pry the armor back, even for a moment, would do nothing but injure them both.

So Clancy allows himself one last look, one last silent goodbye, before the Torchbearer leads the charge, and he breaks off from the rest of the gathered rebellion to slip beneath the streets of Dema.

And he doesn’t look back. Because to look back would destroy the fine line of his meager resolve.

As he runs, he can hear the screams of a battle raging behind him. Dogs braying in the wind, on the scent of their prey, in love with the hunt. He tears across the landscape, retracing steps to a place he once stood when he and Torch got their first taste of real freedom together.

The old storm drain is still busted, the grate loose in its frame. But it’s harder to squeeze himself through the opening this time. He’s older now. Not mention, he’s never once had to break into Dema, never would have thought to try. But if he’s lucky, he won’t have to leave the same way he came in.

If he’s unlucky... Well, it won’t matter anyway.

The Torchbearer has never known battle in the strictest sense, but all his life, he’s known rage. Fire in his belly, fear in his bones. He’s known what it’s like to have his teeth kicked in, and he’s known what it’s like to want to tear flesh from bone. He’s just never had the chance to unleash all that delicious, pent-up fury.

For years and years and years still, he has pressed it down inside of himself. Layer upon layer of injustice and unrest and loss. So, so much loss. He has compressed it into a pearl, bitter and biting and full of potential for a very great, unholy violence.

And now, at last, is the moment.

He looks each goner in the eye as he tears them down. Because he wants the Bishops to know who it is that’s led the armies here today. He wants them to see their end coming for them. He wants them to know their moments are numbered.

Trench rumbles like a stampede beneath his boots, for every body put into the earth and torn from it again. For the blood that has gone unpaid for, that has soaked into the soil. Not another day - he can feel it in his bones - not another soul.

This is the day that Dema falls.

For a while as they lay there together in the quiet of the tent, Torch doesn’t answer, and Clancy’s guts twist painfully. He’s disappointed him again. He’s stolen what’s good from this warm, safe, happy moment and left his oily fingerprints on it. Again.

“I thought so too,” Torch admits softly. Then he’s quick to amend, “Sorry. Not about you. I mean, about me.”

His hand rubs up and down Clancy’s upper-arm. Up and down, in a motion like the tide.

“I thought I’d finally reach a day where I was strong enough, fast enough, brave enough - that I wouldn’t be scared anymore. But I’m leading my family to fight a war, and I’m sending you into a tower to fight the devil alone. And I’m terrified.”

The word twists off painfully at the end, metal warped by an explosion. Torch’s eyes are lost in the dust cloud as he murmurs, “My chest is so tight I can barely breathe. And all my instincts say to take everyone and run. Just leave the city behind to rot… I thought I’d have conquered my fears by now. But I haven’t, and even if we win, it just means more battles. Different fears.”

Torch presses his forehead to the top of Clancy’s beanie, eyes shut tight. “Sorry, I shouldn’t be- That made it worse, didn’t it?”

Clancy bites back all the emotions threatening to drown him and focuses on this, this moment, this person holding onto him now. He says, “No. Thank you,” and he means it, down and down and down to center of himself. He’s never been more grateful for anything.

Sniffing, Torch tucks his chin over the top of Clancy’s head, protective and comforting, and he hums, “What for?”

Clancy takes hold of Torch’s hoodie and grips it tight. “I know I’m not alone.”

The grit of granite bricks beneath his fingertips is a new kind of pain, but he focuses on that rather than the whistling of the wind all around him, a dozen ice-cold hands trying to tear him down from his climb. But he pulls himself higher with each hand-hold, each press of his boot to the stone. Teeth grinding and muscles screaming, he spies the open window and drives himself like a man possessed.

What he wouldn’t give for a pair of wings right about now.

But when he hauls himself up and over the ledge, into the highest chamber, the holiest of unholies, there are only seven Bishops staring back at him in shock. Nico is nowhere to be seen. And the feeling of visceral rage that rips through his body is enough to steal his breath away.

He raises the antlers and begins to tear.

The idea came to him with the vultures. The push and pull fight for control of the vessel. And Clancy pours every ounce of his hatred for these monsters into one, enormous shove to sever their blackened souls from their bodies.

It’s so ridiculously easy.

He’s been growing this power for years without ever realizing it.

Broken for this.

Bleeding for this.

Maybe even born for it.

Sharpened by years of their punishment, he is more powerful than all of them, and oh, the power he could wield if he never put these antlers down. It’s as elating as it is horrifying. He’s drunk on the very thought of it as one by one their bodies crumble. These people he has trembled before, a bleeding supplicant begging for his life, they’re nothing more than rot and bones.

He tastes ozone and the blood running down the back of his throat.

Then he raises his voice, his whole body - even the tower with him - rattling as he screams, “Nico! Show yourself, you coward!”

The back door bursts open in a gust of desiccated wind, and Nico flies into the chamber in a blur of scarlet robes. All of Clancy’s incandescent wrath is gone in an instant at the sight of him, seized instead by a familiar terror of the man who has flayed him open and picked through the pieces of him.

The hand closes around his throat, the antlers drop from his hands, and he thinks - I’ve known this death before. We’re old friends, after all.

But the seizing power doesn’t come. He feels the rush, feels the chill of the icy flood. The familiar numbness that would usually set in from skin to marrow. It washes over him and away. Nothing more than a gentle breeze smelling of sulfur and burning blood.

“Hello, Clancy,” he hears, and he dares to open his eyes in the presence of his Bishop.

“You’ve certainly surprised me,” Nico continues, his fingers still pinned around Clancy’s neck. “You are everything that I have ever dreamed you would be, my child.”

Clancy’s lip curls in disgust. “You don’t control me anymore.”

But Nico only smiles as a dark chuckle rises in his throat. “This isn’t about control. Not anymore. This is about you and me, our ultimate purpose. Or do you not know that we have done this all before?”

He leans forward, as though to whisper a secret. “You do know the truth, don’t you?”

Teeth bared, Clancy spits, “You are nothing more than an evil old man clinging to control because you fear death.”

Nico’s fingers tense on Clancy’s neck, growing tighter, choking off his air now. “And you are an emotional child come to smash what he does not understand, but you will. You will understand what I have built here, before the sun sets on this day, I promise you that.”

Then with a shove backwards, Nico releases Clancy, and the younger man is stunned, frozen to the spot by an action he cannot comprehend. It cannot be mercy, Bishops do not know such things. But Nico isn’t done yet.

He reaches his hands slowly up to the edges of his veil.

“Do you want to know the truth, my dear boy? Of who and what I really am?” He peels back the gossamer veil and the scarlet hood, and he dispenses of the robe altogether. And in shedding these vestments, a sort of illusion drops away before Clancy’s eyes, and he stares instead at himself.

He stares at a boy of sixteen. Dressed in the pale blue shirt he expected to die in. Bearing every mark that a Bishop has ever dealt to him, still fresh and festering and seeping blood. His eyes are weary, his smile gaunt and empty. He is a starving, pitiful thing.

“I am every cut,” the vision speaks, not in Nico’s booming bass tones but in the frail, high-pitched keening of a scared, hurting boy, “I am every rotten thing you hate about yourself. I am your lies you tell to the ones that love you and your burning desire for self-destruction and your bottomless despair.”

He hugs his bleeding arms around his frail chest. Too thin and bony, an empty husk of a boy. “I am you. As you will not see yourself.”

Clancy shudders, his mouth fallen open in shock. He stares but cannot comprehend. He reaches out, as if to brush fingers over the old shirt, the soft tufts of messy brown hair, the many lacerations he remembers and wishes he could forget. But he stops short.

“This- this is a trick,” he stammers, voice choked with tears. His hand flies to his neck, as if he can feel the tracks of black paint, though he cannot see them. “Y-you’re in my head somehow.”

But the boy Clancy was reaches out to place a hand on Clancy’s chest, over where his heart is beating wildly as though it could free itself from his ribs. His hand is warm and real. Two of the fingers are broken at painful angles.

“Of course, I am,” the boy says, a tremor in his voice, “you’ve never been able to deny me access to what is rightfully mine.” He presses his forehead to Clancy’s chest, like he’s tired of holding it up anymore. Like he just wants to sleep.

“This is how we win. This is how we’re together again. Like we were always meant to be.”

Clancy’s arms twitch. There’s a part of himself that wants to wrap this boy, this piece of himself he thought he had forever murdered, in a warm embrace. To comfort him where no one else would. To kiss his bruised knuckles and dry his eyes. He only ever wanted someone to see his pain. Clancy could be that person.

But there’s a pulse in the back of his skull, a painful and searing reminder, that he did not come here for this. He came here to put to death a wicked thing. He came here to end this once and for all.

The boy he was looks up at him with eyes filled with the red of broken blood vessels. “Please, Clancy. I want to go home. I just want to be done.”

And it takes everything inside of him for Clancy to shove the boy backwards. He staggers away, nearly losing his balance, and he curls in on himself as though wounded. As though he could feel one more cut through the stripes on his arms and his back, the bruises painting his skin. He spits blood onto the floor with a resigned sigh.

“Well, if you won’t listen to me. Maybe you’ll take it better from him.”

The doors to the chamber open again to reveal two glorious gone and the broken body they carry between them. The deathless walkers march their prey into the room and drop him on his knees near Nico’s feet where he slumps, unresponsive.

Clancy’s heart takes a stuttering leap like it might reach him. “Torch-”

He can’t see his face. His head is fallen forward, but his hands are slick with blood. His green hoodie is stained with it, dripping drop by precious, crimson drop onto the stone. If he’s breathing at all, Clancy can’t tell.

Stooping to the floor, he scoops up both his antlers, brandishing them at this haunted copy of himself.

But the boy only looks at him with utter exhaustion.

Clancy bites out each word with trembling teeth. “Give. Him. Back.”

“I’m afraid, if you want him-” Nico reaches down and places a hand on Torch’s cheek, and as he does, the Torchbearer raises his head and opens two golden, gleaming eyes. And Nico finishes-

“You’re going to have to take him from me.”

Chapter Text

Clancy wakes alone in a familiar bed.

He couldn’t say for sure if this is in fact his old room. The lights are dimmed to their nighttime settings, on an automatic timer so that the citizens know when to sleep and when to rise. It casts the corners into fearful shadow and buffs away the fine lines. But all the rooms on this block look the same. No defining features.

If it is his old dwelling, any evidence of his previous occupancy has been carefully wiped away. No more lyrics taped to walls. No more pressed flowers lining the edge of his dark, wood desk. Just him and a bed and the buzzing voice of neon. But it feels like it always felt then.

Empty. Isolated.

There’s a needle in his arm, fluids dripping from a saline bag. A small effort against decay. They just won’t let him die. The great heretic of Dema, murderer of seven Bishops, and he’s still kept alive. Held prisoner even in his own body.

After being free of the city for so long, being caged inside four solid walls again crawls with claustrophobia. Added pressure weighing down on his already abused chest. If he had the strength to stand, he would go to the window, open it wide to invite in the breeze, and see if he’s grown wings in his sleep. He thinks he can feel them now, the shuffle of long inky feathers trapped against his lungs making it hard to breathe.

He’d like to peel back his skin and set them free.

Instead, he just fumbles to pull the needle from his arm. He doubts the act will grant him the death he craves, but at least he can be done with that unpleasant physical sensation. The rest of his body, he can’t account for. It is a map of pain. But that’s nothing new.

His mouth tastes foul and coppery. His nose is clogged with dried, clotted blood, and his throat feels ripped raw. Probably from screaming. He thinks he remembers fighting even as they pinned him down. Even when he knew there was no point.

What he does find odd is that his wounds have been dressed. Wrapped and bandaged and stitched, Nico must still want his vessel in good order, after all. And Clancy wonders distantly how long he’ll be allowed this illusion of privacy, before someone comes to drag him back to the Tower.

Let them, he thinks bitterly, he’s done fighting. He’ll be good. He’ll be docile. Bend his knees, say his prayers. Whatever it takes. Just so long as Nico finishes what he started.

His inky fingers scrabble aimlessly along the blanket, a brainless spider that doesn’t know it’s dead. He presses his head back and further back into the pillow, straining like he could almost rise, but he can’t. He should cry, but he can’t. There’s nothing left of him.

Just the ringing question, Why?

Why?

Why?

Why isn’t he dead yet?

Death is an acquaintance that Clancy has known in passing all his life. A familiar figure often referenced but never introduced formally. He knows the back of Death’s shoulders or the reaching of a hand or the whisper of its passing, but not its face.

Throughout the course of Clancy’s life, Death has often been, at least in his own imagination, a kindly shepherd or a cruel thief. But never has it felt more cruel than now. Because no one in the world has ever felt farther from Death than the Torchbearer.

Even when it tried to snatch him away once before, Death couldn’t steal him from Clancy.

And yet, Torch’s normally placid face is torn by a bloody, ragged cut down one side that just barely misses his eye. As he pushes himself to his feet again, Clancy can hear the crunch and pop of broken, disjointed bones sucking and tearing against muscle and forced to move. He holds himself up with no regard for the wounds that brought him down. A ruin of the man he was. Hopeless. Lifeless.

The gold in his eyes, though, that’s the most crushing thing. Clancy can’t look away. He wishes he would drive the antlers into his own eyes to stop from seeing.

They are still such gentle eyes, lit by a mockery of what was.

When Torch inhales, it’s thin and wet, blood coating his teeth and dripping down his chin. “Clancy?”

It’s Torch’s voice, not quite bruised beyond all recognition. Clancy would know it anywhere. But it’s wrong, it’s all wrong. This isn’t his Torchbearer speaking to him now. It’s hardly an echo.

Clancy’s heart is shattered by the sound of another painful inhale. Wheezing and labored and never deep enough to fill Torch’s lungs.

“We don’t… have to do this.” His fists are gripped at his sides, shoulders squared. He’s a puppet barely held up by the strings, but he’s still prepared to fight. “You can… make this stop.”

He died for you, and even now, he cannot rest.

Clancy shakes his head, falling back first one step and then another. His hands grip the antlers tighter as if they can provide a firm hold on the world that is slipping so dangerously from his grasp. His thudding heartbeat pounds in the back of his head. Panic-stricken, it screams at him to fight. But how could he?

“This isn’t real.” He raises one fist to his skull, the base of the antler striking hard against his scalp. “This isn’t- He would never let you take him!”

“You don’t believe your own eyes, Clancy?” Nico asks so tenderly. He places a hand on the Torchbearer’s shoulder, and the way that Torch peers down at him, as though truly seeing a long-lost friend for the first time in so many years. The pain that shines in his eyes. Not for himself but for this lonely, forgotten boy.

Nico shrugs, as though he doesn’t want to do this any more than Clancy does. He murmurs, “Maybe you should take a closer look.”

And then Torch charges at Clancy. His movements are wrong. Staggering, he throws himself forward like some wild, sick animal, but he’s still fast. And Clancy is struck by the fact that all of Torch’s grace has been stolen in death, destroyed at the hands of the city at last.

He really was every beautiful thing.

Clancy doesn’t move in time before Torch slams an elbow into his nose and then drives his knee into Clancy’s gut. The pain that explodes behind Clancy’s eyes is blinding, and the blow to his stomach sends him to his knees. A hand grabs for his shirt collar to keep him from tipping forward. He sags against the Torchbearer’s hold, wishing it meant comfort as it used to.

And when Clancy peers up at him through a haze of tears, Torch’s already bloodied fist crashes into his face. Over and over until blood sprays from between Clancy’s teeth, painting the stone red. Only then does he let Clancy fall.

The vision of the boy Clancy was circles nearer, his arms still wrapped around himself as though he can hide the rust-red stains on his best shirt. “It doesn’t have to be like this,” he whimpers, frightened by this violent display. “We can be together, like we’re supposed to, and you don’t have to hurt anymore.”

Clancy has a split second to spit another gout of blood in Nico’s direction before Torch’s boot connects with his ribs. His mouth yawns wide in a silent cry of pain, and then he’s kicked again and again and again. Curling in on himself, he tries to protect what he can, but he’s too delirious with pain and grief to fight back.

This can’t be happening. Torch was never supposed to be the one to die for this cause. It was always meant to be Clancy, and Torch would mourn. And he would grieve. And then he would continue on into a happier sunset to find a new life somewhere beyond Clancy. He would leave all this darkness behind as nothing more than a painful memory.

It was never supposed to be this.

All the while, Nico’s shattered voice whispers between the cracks of Clancy’s thoughts, “It can be you and me. I’ll take care of you. You’re tired and hurting, I know.” He swears the voice is right by his ear, fingers clasped around his neck and growing tighter and tighter.

“Let me take it away forever.”

The hours of the night slip by as Clancy drifts in and out of sleep. Feverish dreams bloom to life with each shutter of his eyelids, only to fade into an anxious burning beneath his ribs when they open again. He is all rough edges behind his forehead.

Cut on the broken pieces of memory he does not have the heart to fit together again.

When dawn arrives at last, he only knows it by the way the brightness of the neon changes. It flares, sending a sharp pain through the side of his skull. And he turns his face away from it as he has thousands of times before. In hopes that he can wish away the reality of his continued existence in this place.

It’s not until he hears the footsteps thudding down the hallway that his heart stammers back to a half-life. Fear, as always, is a powerful motivator, and Clancy finds himself scrambling into the corner where his bed meets the wall. More movement than he thought himself capable of in such a tattered state. He squeezes himself as tightly against the wall as possible without breaking more bones.

The door’s exterior lock clicks, and a young woman steps slowly inside. She rolls her own saline bag along on a thin metal pole on wheels. In her other hand, she carries a slate metal tray from one of the city’s cafeterias. When her eyes make the slow track up to where Clancy is, perched within the corner, she blinks at him, as though surprised.

“You’re awake,” she says obviously like she’s only just woken up herself. Her eyes are rimmed in dark circles, and her hair is the kind of matted and greasy that Clancy would only recognize from his worst days within the city. Both of her arms are wrapped in fresh, white gauze.

Blinking, she asks, “Does anyone else know yet?”

Clancy does not answer her in any way, but that doesn’t seem to faze the young woman as she limps across the room, allowing the door to fall shut behind her. She sits at the foot of his bed with the tray in her lap and starts to poke listlessly at the meal there.

“I’ve been hiding in here during meals. No one comes in except the nurses, and they’re on a strict rotation.” She reaches to the end of Clancy’s bed and unhooks the clipboard that’s hanging there. Shuffling through the sheets, she swallows a bite of oatmeal.

“You’re not due for another check-in for two hours.”

She lets the clipboard thunk back into place against the plain, wooden board.

“So, I’m eating in here.” It’s not a request, and she doesn’t seem to care about Clancy’s opinion on the subject or the fact that there are rules against this kind of familiarity between citizens, barging into one another’s rooms. The easy way she offers him her breakfast roll, which he dutifully refuses. But after a while without Clancy responding, or relaxing out of his corner, she glances up at him.

“You remember who I am, don’t you? Chart said there was some head trauma, but I didn’t think it was that bad.”

Clancy nods slowly. Though his chest heaves with each breath, he finds it in himself to whisper her name, “Sol.”

“I won’t tell them you’re awake yet.” The look in her eyes is familiar enough. Pity. Even though she looks almost as bad as he does. “Might as well give you a little while longer to rest while you still can.”

Then she goes back to her food.

He allows himself to relax, just a little. Because the pain in his chest is too great and nothing they can do to him now is worse than what’s already been done. But he is worried for her.

“You’ll get in trouble.” For being here. For talking to him. For even knowing him.

Cursed thing that he is.

“What are they going to do to me now?” she asks, sounding tired and empty. She’s eaten so little, and already, she’s begun prodding at the food as though it might get up and walk. “Besides, I’ve never been scared of you.”

Sol glances up at him then. And there’s a sad kind of warmth in her gaze. Not quite pity as he’d first assumed, something like understanding. Empathy. She knows his pain.

She grabs the apple from her tray and offers it to him. “Here, you need it more than I do.”

Clancy accepts the gift and leans back against the pillows, already exhausted from this short exchange. He holds the apple to his chest and considers taking a bite, just to sate the needling in his stomach. Not to nourish his body, but just to numb the pain.

“You can rest if you want,” Sol whispers. “I’ll wake you if I hear someone coming.”

It’s not much, but he accepts that gift, too.

He won’t fight to defend himself. Maybe that means he’s broken, and maybe it means some part of him will never be whole. Won’t matter much longer now, though.

But that doesn’t mean he won’t fight. Because of all the things in the world that the Torchbearer could have asked him for - and Clancy would have given it, given anything and everything, the whole world and the moon and he would even try for the stars, too - he asked for rest.

Clancy pushes himself up from the floor. The world is slurred in a red haze of pain, but the antlers are still in his hands. And that’s all he needs right now.

When the Torchbearer readies the next blow, Clancy reaches up to meet him, the gleaming white bone stained with crimson flecks. And Torch freezes.

Nico has never had trouble gaining access to Clancy’s mind. He feels its something he owns. And Clancy, for better or worse, has never had trouble gaining access to the Torchbearer’s heart. He doesn’t own it. Not in that sense. He never even asked. But it was given anyway.

Nico can’t hold onto that.

He never could touch the Torchbearer, not really.

Clancy stands. It’s an aching process, but he wants to. He stands, and through the connection the antlers provide, he feels the way Torch’s broken body sags with exhaustion. He’s fought so hard for so long.

“You didn’t deserve this,” the words hurt, but most things do right now.

Clancy passes one antler to his other hand so he can reach up and rest his hand on the back of Torch’s head. With a sigh, he pulls their foreheads together and whispers, “I’m so sorry. I should’ve loved you better.”

He can’t let him go, not yet. There’s still one more thing. One more death, and they can both be done.

Clancy turns back to Nico, to this vision of himself as a boy. The boy that Torch saved. The boy that Clancy left behind. The boy that Nico drowned.

His frightened eyes are full of tears, trembling hands outstretched, pleading, “Y-you can’t kill me! Not forever! We are two sides of the same coin, Clancy. Forever linked, forever circling one another-”

Then all that fear and cowering melts into the sick, sadistic sneer that Clancy knows so well.

“This doesn’t end in death, for either of us. You will live to see my eyes in every face you meet, and you’ll spend your whole life wondering. Searching. Dreading,” he stabs a finger against his chest with each word, punctuating, “Just like I did.”

Clancy takes the antler with the single point and turns it around and around in his right hand while Nico staggers back a step.

“You can’t-” he tries once more, and then is silent. Blinking in confusion, a hand to his throat, suddenly his eyes go red.

Something overtakes him then. A pull. Clancy’s grip on the antler tightens until his knuckles go white.

He bares his teeth at the Bishop. “I’m sorry, were you saying something?”

He flicks the second antler, and Nico crosses the floor obediently. One shaking step after the next until they stand inches apart, and the form of the sixteen year-old boy flashes to that of the Bishop, stripped of his robes and his power and even his own will.

Clancy’s whole body shakes. Not with fear. Not with fear this time. It’s with the anticipation of this. How badly he wants this. How good this feels, his demon under his control at last.

“We end this here,” Clancy hisses, “you and me. Together.” Then he pulls. Yanks so hard on Nico’s soul that it tears out of him, but he doesn’t let the wriggling, black thing slip away from him.

He draws it in. Feels the chill of the seize. Ink in his veins.

And he drives the end of the antler through Nico’s chest for good measure, just to be sure there is no chance of retreat. The boy, the man, flashes of them both as the illusion fades, and Clancy twists the antler deeper, blood running down his fingers, until he’s staring into Nico’s scarlet eyes as he dies. Listens to him breathe his last, even though he’s still lodged alongside Clancy’s soul.

He lets the body tumble to the floor.

Clancy’s chest burbles with a bout of compulsive laughter. He feels tears on his cheeks and looks down to see the black ink coating both his hands. He hasn’t stopped shaking yet as he turns back to the Torchbearer. He knows he must be a wreck. They both are.

It’s a childish thing to do, but Clancy wraps his arms around his best friend and clings. He doesn’t want to let go.

“S-stay with me.”

He’s not sure how long he can hold Nico in check like this. They’ve shared a body before, after all, and Clancy was rarely able to maintain control. Trying his best to keep his hand steady, he raises the bloody antler to his throat, sure of where the carotid artery pulses beneath his skin.

But before he can drive the antler in, a hand closes tight around his wrist. Strong and desperate and warm. Clancy screams and fights as he’s wrestled to the floor, thrashing and cutting at anything that gets close to him. He feels the hands pin him down, feels them rip the antlers away, feels the chance for death slipping from him, and he knows.

He’s lost.

“Clancy? Wake up.” Someone is shaking his shoulder gently, shaking him awake, but Clancy doesn’t want to be here anymore. “Clancy- someone is coming.”

He opens his eyes to see Sol’s worried face hovering near his, and he scrambles back from her. The apple tumbles to the floor, a single bite taken from it. It rolls towards the doorway as Clancy presses himself into the corner once more, as though he can flee what’s coming for him now.

Oh, he wishes he had wings.

The door opens. And a nurse in Dema gray scrubs enters. But the band around her arm isn't red, as it should be. It isn’t any color at all. The sight of it makes Clancy’s eye twitch, and when she stops, shocked to see him awake, she half turns back towards the hall.

She’s followed by three more figures, these dressed in green with more of the colorless tape marking their loyalty. Banditos. Not just any banditos, either. Clancy recalls each of their names acutely.

Luna, Matteo, and Arrow, the surviving members of Trench’s war council. Walking around in the middle of the city, in broad daylight of all things.

Clancy whimpers. “No, no, no. Please…” They’ve come to take him away, drag him to the wilderness and start this all over again, but he can’t. He can’t do this anymore.

He falls from the bed and crawls for the window. He can make it, pushing himself to his feet despite the pain. He throws it open. There’s shouting behind him. The breeze hits his cheeks, warm and sweet with spring flowers somewhere far away.

But those awful hands close around him again and pull him back from the ledge. He wails and hopes that all of Dema hears him scream. His fists strike at his captor, eyes blind with tears and black emptiness.

“Clancy, look at me! Look!” a voice snaps in his ear. “Clancy, it’s me! Look at me!”

He doesn’t look. He just sucks the saliva from his teeth and spits it into their face. They stagger back, releasing him, and he tries for the window again and falters. He falls sideways into the wall. Before he can correct, he’s pinned again, both wrists to the concrete, unable to flee, unable to move, unable to die.

“Let me go! Let me go,” he begs them. Why won’t they let him go?

“Clancy! It’s me- it’s Josh, please, please look.”

He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to see Torch shattered, denied his peaceful death, propped up by some terrible power. But he can’t help himself either. For another look.

But this isn’t the nightmare from before at all. He’s dressed in gray and black, with a high collar around his neck. His hair is longer, and the sides and back of it are dipped in red. Not blood, but more vibrant. Rebel red. And his eyes- His eyes are a gentle, familiar brown. Warm as sunsets. Alive and whole and just him.

Clancy can’t speak for the shock. He doesn’t have to. Because Josh drags him into a hug so tight, Clancy groans from the pain in his ribs, and Josh has to loosen it just a little, even though they’re both crying now.

Even though he won’t dare let him go.

Chapter Text

“Did I disappoint you?”

His head is tipped back, back to peer up at the sky because the moon is bright on a night this deep, but the city’s glow blots out all the chattering stars. So he stands alone with the moon, on the edge of this roof. Brutal symmetry of the city rising around him like coming home to find the exposed bones of a burned out house.

And his hands, his stained hands smell of gasoline.

In this light though, he is a little bit the boy he was and a little bit the monster he became, an overcompensation brought on by so much pain. But standing in the blue-lit doorway of the stairwell that leads up to the roof, the man who was the Torchbearer has never seen anything more lovely.

He wraps a blanket around Clancy’s bare shoulders.

“You came back. How could I possibly be disappointed?”

He doesn’t turn from the night sky, lost somewhere in the inky abyss of nothing and more nothing where the city swallows the light. It’s a tragedy, compared to the view from their island.

But there’s a staggering distance between them, too. Standing side by side. Neither of them know how to fill this space.

When the sky cleared over Dema and the warm weather thawed the ground enough to dig, they buried the Torchbearer near the edge of the city. They lowered him down in a pine box overflowing with yellow flowers to cover the broken parts of him and the bloodstains on his clothes. The petals cloaked half his face, as though growing from the cut.

Clancy saw him laid out, saw him buried. He sees him now, frozen beside him. A monster and his ghost. And there is so little left of either of them. They are empty things, robbed of purpose. Fates they fulfilled but did not allow to be the end of them. Not quite.

“It broke me.” Clancy presses inky fingers into the grooves between still-mending ribs. He finds it too hard most days to even lift his arms and put on a shirt. The marks are visible, the ripple and lace of scars. His skin the written testament of a Bishop’s cruelty.

“It broke us both.”

Josh holds his hands up to the moon and watches the way the silver light slants through them. The fingertips shine, somewhat transparent when he’s not focusing on them. All his energy poured into remaining as solid as possible, but Clancy knows he slips. Some days are better than others.

Some days he’s little more than a whisper in Clancy’s ear.

Clancy tips his head to the side. The invisible stars do not hold half as much fascination as the man on the roof beside him. And he’s still afraid that if he doesn’t watch him carefully, Josh will disappear for good.

“I can still feel when you’re watching me,” Josh hums and lowers his hands, but when he turns to look, Clancy’s gaze darts away. He doesn’t want Josh to see the red in his eyes. “Ask me.”

But Clancy chews his lip and tastes his own blood and thinks of Nico invading every part of his body. This vessel they now share. “I don’t want to.”

Josh’s shoulder is solid against his own, a quiet promise. “Ask me anyway.”

They will play this game as many times as it takes.

“Is it my fault?” Clancy murmurs with an ugly, jagged tear in his voice and the creeping bitterness in his chest from a soul now grafted onto his own. He can feel - actually feel - the chill of Nico’s fingers on his throat. “Am I the reason you’re stuck here?”

Death-eater, heretic, bishop.

Josh’s smile is still easy, a cool hand over a feverish forehead. He sighs. “Not stuck. Just stubborn, as usual. And no, you’re not the one who did this.” He looks away, away, eyes distant and airy and strange. “I did it. I got distracted for… for just a second, and it was too late. They surrounded me, and I knew I wasn’t getting away this time, so I just…”

He sucks in a slow breath of the stale city air. “I projected as far out as I could, and I kept going and going until.” He snaps his fingers, and Clancy winces without meaning to. “I knew I could do it, just cut ties and run. I almost did it on accident once, pushing myself too far. It nearly killed me.”

“So, why didn’t it this time?” Clancy has spent the last few weeks silently buried beneath the blame for this act that he cannot fully believe now it was not some dark art of his own that denied the Torchbearer his death again.

“Trench,” Josh supplies simply. “It’s a gift, I think. For what we’ve done.”

Clancy frowns softly. “Trench?”

“She’s going back to sleep, so I guess I’m sort of on my own now, watching her garden while she’s away,” he whispers and what a strange thing to say. But Clancy finds it right somehow, within himself. He doesn’t question anymore.

It is best, he thinks, not to interrogate miracles.

“Why does a continent need to sleep?” he asks instead and lets his mind wander out into the night. It’s drunken and weary and so often finds itself waking up in dark places.

He feels Josh take his hand, and he doesn’t flinch to thread their fingers together despite the fact that Clancy’s hands are always so cold.

“To dream.” Josh gives his hand a tug, a gentle invitation away from the ledge.

“What does a continent dream of?” And Clancy allows himself to be led, over the rooftop and down the stairs.

“Dragons and creepy little creatures that live in caves,” Josh tells him, as they slip through the hallway back to a series of gray rooms cloistered in darkness. “Maybe things we haven’t seen before.”

But Clancy snags in the doorway, caught on a slew of unhappy memories. These rooms and the person who lived here and the reason he’s here now. They’ve tucked him away for safe-keeping. While the battle for the heart of the city has already been waged, the war he set in motion rolls on, banditos and rebels and loyalists still deciding the fate of the city. And it seems that his own fate is awaiting some final decision, when all is said and done.

Do they still want him to be a part of their new world when he carries the old one around with him like a second heartbeat? With what he chose to become?

Josh senses his hesitance, and he turns back, their fingers still entwined. His eyes flicker over Clancy’s tired expression, and it makes his heart squeeze to remember the way that he hid behind Josh when the other banditos came for him. That shame he carries, despite everything. But Josh would show him what a wonder he is, no matter what it takes.

“We don’t have to sleep here,” he suggests, the idea blossoming into a grin, infectious and even a touch wild. “Let’s run away.”

Clancy draws back, fingers dropping dead out of Josh’s grasp. Black closes around his throat, his wrists, his hands. He’s not a thing to behold. He is a thing to hide away. “I can’t, you know I can’t. They told me to stay here.”

He doesn’t want to admit it. He doesn’t want to say:

He’s still waiting for someone to decide if he deserves to live or die.

“Since when,” Josh asks, taking a step further into the swallowing shadows of Clancy’s old rooms, “have you ever done as you’re told?”

The weakest of smiles discovers itself at the corner of Clancy’s mouth, held there like a secret. He might be a monster, an unwanted omen, but he can be persuaded, sometimes, to remember that he is also human.

“One day,” Josh insists with a gentle jut of his chin and another step backwards. “We’ll only be gone a day. They won’t even notice.”

I want to spend a sunny day with you.

Clancy’s one wish.

He’s almost out of sight now. “Please? For me?”

That secretive smile morphs into something bolder. It could almost be mistaken for one of his old smiles, mischief in the cut of his crooked teeth. “That’s cheating. You know it’s cheating when you ask like that.”

Eyes alight, Josh grins triumphantly. “Pack a bag.”

Dead or alive, no one knows how to flee the city better than he does.

They steal away by cover of night as they always would before, but now at least, there’s little risk in getting caught. For either of them. But that doesn’t detract from the thrill of a clandestine act, and even Clancy finds himself holding his breath each time they slip into a shadowy doorway to hide from a passing bandito patrolling the streets.

Down inside the tunnels, Josh whispers, “Race you,” directly into Clancy’s ear, and he doesn’t have to think before he starts running. He just does. It hurts his bruised ribs, but it’s a good kind of pain. The kind that only comes from being alive and wanting to stay that way.

They slip out through the old storm drain and race for the dark green cover of trees. Above them, the night is lit up by a thousand whispering stars all leaning in to witness this bold display of human frailty and endurance.

They run until they can’t anymore, until Clancy is on the ground gasping for air with tears streaking from the corners of his eyes. Clutching his sides, Josh tumbles into the leaves beside him, and together they stare up at the stars. And they laugh again. At the ridiculousness of this. At the familiarity, despite the fact that everything is different, everything.

“I think,” Clancy gasps, more tears making tracks down the sides of his face as the delirious joy begins to fade into a full-body ache of contentment, “I think it just now feels real... That we did it. And we’re safe. Nobody's coming for us.”

No one coming to drag him away. No one coming to drag them apart. Just days and more days of this.

He crawls closer, though he doesn’t have to go far, to lay his head on Josh’s chest and feel the rhythm of his breathing. And he doesn’t know if this is some illusion, too. He doesn’t care. It’s real enough.

Josh’s arm around him his real. “We can go wherever we want.” His fingers card through the soft brown of Clancy’s regrown hair, a little solid proof he’s still alive. “Or we could stay, help them rebuild.”

Clancy pulls his knees closer to his chest. “You could stay. The others don’t want me anymore.”

Josh’s hand stills in his hair, listening to the way the words tremble from Clancy’s cracked lips.

“I’m just Nico’s vessel now. I’m a Bishop. I’m not… They’re never going to see me as anything else.”

But does he even still believe that, or is he simply rehearsing this familiar spiral? Didn’t he put these fears to death? Cut them through with sharpened bone and leave them to rot?

“You are more powerful than nine Bishops,” Josh says and taps a finger to Clancy’s temple, three quick times. “You have this indomitable heart that has brought you through more than anyone should have to withstand, and you still doubt?”

Clancy glances sideways at him, through tear-heavy lashes. Then he shuts his eyes and tries to feel as strong as whatever Josh has always seen in him.

“They will understand. Give them time. And give them some credit, too.” He chuckles and continues stroking his fingers through the short, fine strands. “You’re just a lot to take in these days, that’s all.”

Then once they’ve both caught their breath, Josh builds them a fire because that’s what he does, and Clancy draws his instrument from his bag because who would he be if he didn’t drag it along with him everywhere? He has to flex his fingers against the cold, work the blood back in again, and hope they still remember how to do this.

But the songs return. Those are the things that he is made of, after all. Not only blood and bone and ink, but breath and music and that stubborn seed of hope. It lends itself to him now, to the way the chords bounce back at him from the trees.

He thinks he could almost sing.

“Does he hurt you?”

Clancy glances up from his strumming to see Josh holding his hands over the fire, watching him closely. His fingers freeze on the strings. “Only if I let him.”

This makes Josh’s brow furrow, and there’s a familiar anger in the way his jaw twinges at the corner. Clancy is almost overjoyed to see it there, proof that Josh is still himself. Fiery and stubborn-willed. He wants to try. Still willing to fight, for Clancy.

“We could find a way to get him out of you. Get rid of him for good.” Josh moves closer again, looking steadily into Clancy’s eyes, all oaths and fearless loyalty. “If I can still be here, we can find a way, I know it.”

Clancy smiles, slightly cowed within the spotlight of Josh’s intensity but also caught up in the tidal wave of him. Still his Torchbearer.

“No, I think this is where he needs to stay.” He puts a hand to his chest. Feels the rise and fall of each breath, each a subtle surprise, a body still persisting, still healing. “As long as he’s here, I can control him. As long as he’s here, he doesn’t have any teeth.”

And as he says it, Clancy knows it to be true. There’s a peace to it, a muscle that is at last allowed to relax. He will face this fear without flinching. The knowledge that this thing inside of him he has fought for so long is under his power now. And it still hurts, but he’s conquered it in a way. Now he owns it.

It’s not Nico anymore. It’s just him.

Josh hums again, and his eyes catch on Clancy’s hands. “Do you know how your song ends now?”

Tipping his head down to hide his grin, Clancy searches inside himself - is he ready for this? - before admitting, “I do.” He is.

Josh scoffs at him and kicks Clancy’s foot. “Well! Sing it for me!”

And this time, he does.

They wait out the sun that way and greet the morning as it dawns for them. Sweet and bright and full of gold. A shade of yellow that melts through Clancy’s vision and pushes the gray aside to welcome him home.

This is their morning, the one they have waited and paid and hoped for. And it’s warm on Clancy’s skin, as he shuts his eyes to really soak it in. How it traces gentle fingers over this body that’s his, really his, that has weathered so many storms and withstood them. A tattered flag that’s still waving.

And he doesn’t know it now, but somewhere, the light is shining on so many other mornings. On so many other days, stretched out like the ripples from a hundred stones skipping over the top of a glassy lake. This is only the first of many. And he can’t even imagine them in this moment if he tried, how full this life will be.

“Was it worth it?” he asks softly. “For this?”

They lean together, breathing together.

“For this? I’d do it all again if I had to.”