Chapter Text
It started with blood.
His hands knew blood.
His hands knew harm so much more intimately than they knew healing.
So, naturally, this too started with blood.
Now, looking at his hand, it didn't seem out of place at all. After years of fighting with them, he sometimes thought they looked more natural drenched in dripping life, dripping death, than clean.
It was his own blood, this time, coating his hand and already rimming his nails with a thin, dark crust. And he stared at it, caught in the calm of the moment, with a sense of wonder and hilarity.
Sharp reflexes and sharper blades.
In the quiet of his room, and in the early hours of a new day that found everyone, even Rett, asleep, he had dropped a knife and he had caught it before it had a chance to clatter against the floor.
A fine, not overly long line across his palm pulsed a steady, if thin, stream of blood from under his skin, slowly filling the concave of his hand.
It didn't hurt.
The knife he'd put down carefully, only the barest hint of wetness along its cutting edge, but Pyke wasn't quite sure what to do with himself now.
The choice to catch it, had barely been a choice at all, his hand had closed around the blade almost before he knew it was falling. And now he found himself incapable of choosing the next of his actions.
Should he clean the blade first, return it to its spot, neat and in secret? Should he clean his hand before that, stinging it with soap and wrapping it tightly? Should he stitch himself up in the med area? It was a knife with a promised lethality, functional, thinner than a razor. Would it scar him?
The slowness to his mind, as well as the fumble in his fingers, he'd later explain by his lack of sleep.
Only when the pool filled and the first drop breached the rim, threatening to stain the floor, he acted. Wherever he walked, he would leave a trail of his blood now. Drops, easy to clean and just as easy to miss.
A black handprint on white fabric would be evidence to this moment, evidence to the hours just before motion awoke in his home.
A crudely-cut sheet of white hemp covered Pyke's window to space. Ever since he'd stared into the aether and had another stare back at him, with eyes that he'd hoped and worked hard to forget, but that had stayed painfully familiar.
He'd driven himself mad expecting him there, in his window. At the edge of his vision, observing his sleep, staring at his back and fading into mist when Pyke eventually turned to look. A constant, terrible itch to his skin.
He covered it up, in the end, he had to. Pushing it to the side every few hours to look for the stars, and letting it fall into place to look for his peace of mind.
It took just one step, one sweeping motion, and his blood soaked into the fabric.
His own, black, handprint. With its uneven edges, and elongated fingers where he had dragged his hand down before coming to a rest.