Chapter Text
He steps towards the house with purpose. She has something of his, and he wants it back. It shouldn’t have been with her to begin with.
Curtains closed but door ajar, she is waiting for him. He knows she is, can feel it. Sees it, finally, when her face comes into view—cold and glassy and lifeless. Her body on the floor is his doing, the blood seeping around her may as well have been wrung from his very hands. But it is a strange death, since he cannot recall kissing her.
A boot of his is stained by the crimson puddle. It reaches him lightly, unsure, its caress trepid but pushing forward with a hungering need. It doesn’t touch his skin, and he wipes it away on the carpet.
Bending down over her body, his eyes linger over her face for a few seconds. It’s one he recognises. It should be lined with regret, he thinks, but doesn’t pause to consider the expression held upon it instead. His eyes flicker to her shoulder, her arm, down to her fingers, still curled over his possession even in death.
He reaches down and plucks the coin from her hand like an apple from its stem. In her other hand she holds a letter, folded nicely into her palm with carefully curled characters traced across it—Jacks, it says. Perhaps she was hoping he would read it. Instead he straightens and steps away.
He flicks the coin into the air, catching it neatly between his fingers. It shimmers, glinting directly into his eyes and making him squint.
None of the moon’s soft light is reaching this room, not with the curtains fastened tightly in place; there should be no glint.
Lowering the coin, a key enters his line of sight, still in the keyhole of a door he hadn’t taken notice of. Tucking the coin into his pocket, he’s there in an instant, fingers grazing the dark metal thing that’s jutting out. He feels no hum, no pulse, no feeling of interest. There was no reason for him to be directed here.
He turns the key. It stubbornly sticks in place for a second before it yields, scraping against the body of the lock with a low, dull sound. The doorknob is less apprehensive, but there is resistance in it still.
The curtains are not closed in this room; the moon beams are thick and clear in the air. They falter at the edge of a cot.
Jacks crosses the room with little thought, only meaning to peer at whatever secret the woman was keeping here and then leave, but is stopped…
The secret has a face. Her head is turned against the light, brows held low and nose scrunched as if deep in thought. The small hands at her sides are curled into fists, fingers tangling in her hair which is– everywhere, somehow. Framing her face. Making it profusely more visible in the dim light.
There’s a deep pit in his stomach, a humming sort of thing that’s tugging at him in a way he doesn’t like the sound of right now. He can’t ignore it—not when just brushing this child’s face is making his fingers burn. It’s hot and heavy and empty all at once, it’s curling in around him like smoke, clinging to his skin in a sheen of cold sweat. There is anger somewhere in the pool of emotions dragging him down, he can feel it settling into his jaw and his teeth ache with the feel of it.
The realisation is silent, but deafening all the same. It whirls away the room and leaves him alone with a possibility he had never even considered.
And for a second he thinks to himself—the moon is the only witness, the mother the only one that could have known, her lips the only ones that could have told. Those lips are cold now, losing color by the minute. Nobody else would know except—
He takes a step away from the child and then pivots, back at the woman’s body in a few strides. The letter in her palm seems far more important now. He snatches it out of her hand in an ungraceful, cutting motion and flips it open with one hand. Carefully crafted slanting words cover the page in nonsensical lines of passion, but only one jumps out to him—daughter, it says. He folds the paper before his eyes can latch onto a name.
He considers burning it, or doing something far more permanent, but his thoughts are left uncompleted when he flips the small square in his hand and there, on the back, is written Prince of Hearts. So she knew—she knew he was a Fate, must have figured it out once the child was born. If he had felt that familiar humming in the child, then being her mother, she must have, too. Only it must have been alien and aberrant to her, an unwelcome feeling.
Shame. He supposes he should be glad she was not using this child as blackmail or some sort of baby trap, though it’s hard to believe that was not what she had been intending to do in the first place. Whatever had gone wrong or changed her mind, it had something to do with the child—the little girl. The woman must have seen something that stopped her.
He should have been careful. A thousand thoughts pound against his head and he grimaces, dreading the outcome of all this. Because though he wants to just walk away and pretend he had never seen anything, he has a feeling this will not be the end of it. It cannot be. The thrumming in his veins is too strong for this to be a momentary event. Distinctly, he can almost hear the scratching of a pen as whatever Destiny that exists begins to write another convoluted tale for him to follow. It is unsettling.
If only he had kissed this woman that night—killed her right there and then. She would not have had time to steal one of his Luckless Coins, would not have had time to bear the child sleeping just a few breaths away, and would not have started this mess of a story. And if she had to have been compelled to do such a foolish thing anyway, at the very least she could have had the mercy of not calling him here once she chose to die. One Coin was not worth the tiresome situation Jacks finds himself in.
He runs a hand across his jaw, pressing against the ache in his bones. A groan begins to escape his lips but at the very same moment the child sighs. It carries over to him through the thin walls, rendering him frozen. Not moving, as if it would wake her, he glimpses through the doorway where only the foot of the cot is visible, the girl’s limbs tangled among her blankets.
He wonders if the door had been locked so she would not wake up to such a gruesome sight. It’s laughable, how little thought has been put into it, while he is holding a handwritten letter, standing upon a scene perfectly crafted just for him. The child might have appreciated the notion a little more.
With every passing second, simply forgetting this seems more and more desirable. Nobody else had been with him when he received the summons, nobody had to know that he was here. And if, in a couple of years, the child decides to find him… he could deal with her then.
He turns to head out of the house but pauses in the foyer, one hand holding onto the wooden doorframe. Slowly retracing his steps he brushes past the body on the floor and appears in the doorway of the child's room, sparing nothing but a brief glance in her direction before pulling the door shut. The key turns easily this time, and slips into his pocket just as well.
━━━━━━━━━━
The door to his apartment offers less resistance than usual as he swings it open. Exhaustion seems to seep into the cracks of his joints, weighing him down.
The decision of forgetting, of choosing to walk away, should have lifted the burden from his shoulders, but instead it seems determined to sink him. Every step away from that house feels like wading through a tide determined to pull him in, and if he doesn’t keep walking he will slip and fall and the aegean abyss will consume all that he has worked for.
A resounding thud sounds through the small room as the door clicks shut behind him, and he hopes it is the sound of Destiny’s leather-bound tome shutting itself upon this story. It is not one he wants to be a part of. Shoulders lowering, neck craned to the sky, Jacks takes a moment to breathe, to close his eyes and embrace the finality of the decision that belies his moniker of Fate. Just for a moment.
When he opens them, he takes care to turn them away from the woman laying across his divan in the center of the room.
“You’re tracking in blood,” she says.
He focuses on a glass of wine, placed on a low round table near him—for him, he presumes—too far for her to reach. He pinches its stem between two fingers and lifts it to his lips as if to take a sip.
“It’s not my own,” he murmurs in response, bringing the glass further from his face. In the reflection there is a glaze of deep, earthy colors bending around its curve, stretching across the surface the way shadows do. Interrupting the haze of light is a silhouette, so much darker in the reflection than Jacks remembers.
He doesn’t turn to see the man behind the divan, but feels the light emanating from him anyway. How could he not, when it burns so fierce against his back?
“You would run away, Jacks?”
Like flames doused in alcohol, lapping wetly at his neck, his voice is dripping in its intensity.
“The Lady Prisoner has been extremely useful lately,” he provides as an explanation, though Jacks didn’t ask how he knew. “Her foresight is mighty handy when it comes to secrets.”
That voice of his, smooth and adhering, slips into his ear so close, he must be right behind him.
“That is to say—I know about the girl.”
Jacks finally turns, staring up at him with a glare that suddenly feels like a petulant mockery of one rather than the real thing, though he knows it would not look that way to anybody who could see it. He has perfected the design of his expressions for far too long for that to be the case.
Of course, The Fallen Star is not just anybody.
“Care for a drink?” Jacks swirls the glass of wine precariously, held between two fingers with little care. The crimson liquid rises higher and higher, lapping at the curves of its container with growing vigour. He is regarded with nothing but a blank stare, and tilts his head in response. “It’s not everyday that The Fallen Star himself breaks into my apartment.”
“I am here for the girl.”
A drop of liquid scarlet catches at the rim, holding at the edge in a moment of bated silence. The moment passes too long, but the younger Fate does not respond until the bead of wine has slipped over the edge and begun slowly trailing down the glass.
“Why would you want that child?” Jacks asks. His mind turns back to the way she slept in the embrace of the moon, right through her mother’s death. Such little had separated her from the blood pooling outside her door. What use could he see in her?
“The child is half-Fate, with potential to fully ascend. We have not seen the offspring of a Greater Fate before, Jacks. Think of the power it could hold—the power it could wield when put to use.” Jacks doesn’t see him step closer, but nothing else explains the sudden shadow he casts. “Trained from birth, think of what it could do.”
What a horrible life she would live.
It is not surprising that The Fallen Star would know about his daughter before he did, or that he plans to turn her into a Fate—in fact, he should have expected it. Should be happy about it, considering he wanted nothing more than to walk away from her life.
But this would not be walking away. This would be carrying her directly into the arms of the devil. He may as well string the leash around her throat himself. Death will not save her once she becomes a Fate—and become a Fate she will, because what use will she have otherwise? Jacks remembers all too well the look in Gavriel’s eyes as it had happened to himself, how quickly their subtle warmth had flared and twisted into a blaze of hellish conflagration.
Oh, blast the girl. What would it matter?
“I’m surprised you came to me,” Jacks says, breaking eye contact to look around for a place to lean on. “Since when does The Fallen Star ask?”
“Even I have a moral code, Jacks. I would not take a man’s rightful possession without… asking.” He doesn’t like the word. Jacks can tell.
Possession. Of course. A Fate does not have children—how could he?—he has possessions. He is an owner, not a father. Of course.
The wine finally slips past his lips, forcing down the bile in his throat. The taste hardly registers with him, and they both know he is not tipsy, but he finds himself a fool in front of Gavriel anyway. His mind never seems to work around him, and for a brief second he wonders if it’s on purpose; if The Fallen Star has more control over the Fates than they think. But then again—who doesn’t know of this? It is hard to speak up in front of your liberator, and harder still if there was no cage to begin with.
“I have my own plans for the child.” His lips form the words without consulting him. “I was going to take her from the funeral, lest she see me kill her mother.”
A pause. A look too cool for its owner.
“I would not run away.”
A breath, finally. Gavriel seems to smile, but Jacks can’t for the life of him tell why. The throbbing, unsettling feeling has returned, but he doesn’t quite care to linger on it, only on the man in front of him, watching carefully as he turns away and leaves with movements that are far, far too slow. Jacks does not see him disappear, but the suffocating warmth of the room has diffused and his lungs no longer ache with each breath.
The glass shatters in his hand, fingers curling into the shards until there is blood trickling down his skin. And still the pain is not enough to drown out the rushing torrent in his head. He finds himself grasping tightly to the feeling, anchoring himself to it. When he brings his wrist to his teeth, biting into the flesh in the hopes of uncoiling the acrid, gritty knot in his throat, he finds neither wine nor blood harbor the sweet shock he had been hoping for. Despite their differing colors—the gold of his blood nauseatingly prominent—they’re indistinguishable when stained upon his sleeve.
“You should have kissed that woman when you had the chance.”
The woman's voice carries over from where she lays across his divan.
Why isn’t she gone?
“Why didn’t you kiss her, Prince of Hearts? Why would you let her live?”
The shards don’t dig into his boots, no matter how hard he presses. They rasp under his feet, leaving small scratches in their wake. He can’t hear them over the grinding of his teeth.
“What did you think would happen?”
“You realise that you no longer have any place of respite?” He says, and it is cruel. “You have done this to yourself.”
She holds his gaze. One hand buries itself in the midst of her hair, tangling amidst the short strands with a vice-like grip. It takes a few seconds before her claws relax, travelling lower to rub at her scalp with the pads of her fingers in small, circling motions.
“As have you.” Her voice carries, despite it being nothing more than a whisper. “And Gavriel would have found out anyway, whether I had told him of this place or not. He always does. We could not have hidden our secrets from him anymore than we could hide ourselves.”
He runs his tongue over his teeth. She looks away. He finds himself wondering how far a Fate’s influence extends over humans. She’s a strange one, as far as humans go—smart, not so young yet so, so…
Tragic.
Then again, she had called him by the same name the first time he had found her sitting in his apartment and done nothing about it, the very mention of Gavriel enough for him to look away. And suddenly it’s no longer something he wants to think about. It had never crossed his mind that she would tell the elder Fate where to find him, but in the end Jacks has many more places he can go—what does the human have?
“I’m surprised his pet didn’t follow at his heels,” he comments, walking away from the shattered glass. Its texture remains with every step he takes. “He seems rather vexed after not getting his way.”
“Who else will I go to, in the end?”
If only she would speak a little louder; he can hear every drop of his blood hit the floor. When there are no words in her mouth it’s silent enough to pretend she isn’t there.
“I thought it would satiate the desire,” he says to the walls. The desire to kiss remains unsaid.
“It didn’t work.”
Of course it didn’t work. Because a Fate can’t escape from their curse. He could never hope to overcome it.
So why didn’t he kiss her? Kill her there and then?
There’s no point in ruminating on the thought. He just doesn’t know.
“It was not a kindness, what you did,” she says.
That, he knows.
“Masquerading humanity will not make you human.”
“I know.”
“You have ruined both of their lives. That child is not human. It will not be enough to fit in, it will always have something unnatural residing within, something wrong with it. It will forever be reminded of its abnormality.”
The woman speaks with more bite than her soft voice should allow.
“Do you think you, an inhuman shell, can be a father?”
The conversation has, inevitably, spun towards the girl. The little girl who must be awake by now, locked in that room with nothing but the moon. He wonders if her mother’s blood has begun to seep under the door yet, if it will have stained the legs of her cot before she opens her eyes, if she’ll spare any words for the woman who won’t—can’t—hear her screams. Maybe she’ll watch it happen in silence, linger on the scene until the only remaining portrait of that woman will be the imprint of her blood on her hands, soaked into her palms, encrusted between her knuckles. Will she keep her alive under her nails? Swallow her, when she brings those fingers to her lips? Does she need to feel her mother’s blood inside of her to remember that they share it?
He could not bear to say these thoughts aloud. Not when he is the damner.