2ADDITIONAL WARNING: Rated for some wickedness, curse words, and implied sex. Nothing too graphic, I don't think, but I've been watching R rated anime this afternoon, so am not easily shocked today.
Up Against the WallMoonlight and grappa, that's how he'll always remember this city. He's high as a kite with the wind holding him up against the stars, the cobblestones just one more obstacle before he can find a cool place to lie down. Lie down and die, die, die, only it's not that simple, is it? Nothing is ever that simple.He raises a flag of drunkenness, staggering through people, and things which used to be people, and things which walk like people but are anything but, and all the while the cobbles are looking awfully inviting and he's thinking 'they must be softer than I remember'.
Testing this theory hurts. It hurts a lot, and that's saying something for one of his kind. The fact that he's drunk at all is a mammoth feat in itself; a big, woolly mammoth. But even a celestial body can only process so much moonshine.
Hands. He likes hands as a rule, but these are the rough and mistreating kind. They hurt his skin.
He tells them to piss off and leave him alone, but the hands, poor earless things, don't heed him and drag his protesting body back up into the untrustworthy air where there's very little to hold onto. The hands are attached to arms and a body and even a head, and he finds himself looking into a pair of eyes so pale they're almost white, lashed with more of the same white, making the pupils black as death by comparison.
Death. Black. Strange. Death should be red, like anger and blood and fire and the insides of the pretty, pretty people who always seem to come apart so easily, not black on white in a white face framed with hair that looks, this close up, more silver than white.
Of course, he knows who this is. "Jed," he manages. "Lemmego."
"She wants you," the albino tells him.
She. The word conjures up a complicated image of curves and softness and an overwhelming terror and yearning and pain and fuckFuckFUCK I can't see her now, not now, not ever again, pleasenoleasenopleaseno! No! NO! N-!
What comes out of his mouth is more along the lines of, "Ngh," as he scrabbles to get away. He-who-was-Jeddiel hauls him to his feet and strong-arms him back through the people and the not-people.
"Damnit, Ruan, you're more trouble than you're worth. I don't know why she even bothers with you."
He-who-has-become-Ruan whimpers. He knows. He has the scars to prove it, a tale told in epic verse on his skin and re-told and re-told until he could recite it himself word perfect.
"Don't," he begs. "Go."
"If you wanted to get away," ex-Jeddiel is saying in a bored, sick-of-this-shit voice, "you wouldn't waste time drowning yourself in whatever the fuck you've been drinking. So I figure, you like it." He sounds amused. "Sick, sick little Fallen." Which is rich, coming from him.
"Please." He hates the whine in his voice. Weak, weak, weak, but he never meant for any of this, never wanted to be like them, only uncovered a flaw in his heart and his faith, and the card-castle of his world buried him.
Not like once-Jeddiel. Some people trip. Some are pushed. Some don't see the edge until it is too late. Some scrabble for handholds, desperately trying to hang their weight on a blade of grass. And some, like the-Jeddiel-that-was, dive headfirst into the chasm singing Hallelujah and Glory in the Highest.
"Please!"
They had never been friends. Not before. Not during the war, when everything had been crystal, when he had been full of love and the knowledge that he was loved. Not after the world had been turned inside out and flooded with chaos. Not when the-one-they-called-Ruan discovered doubt and all the beautiful cracked-diamond emotions that come with it, like fear, and hate, and need, and desire.
There were no friends among these, these monsters. Now-Ruan had seen them turn on each other like starving wolves, and the newest of them were the most zealous hunters of their own, and the Others.
He wept whenever one of Them were brought in, those poor bewildered things, with their pride and their innocence and the scent of apple-blossom clinging to their skin. They fought, but not hard enough, not knowing what they were fighting for. Sanity. Sanity was not the first thing to go, that was self-respect, but sanity was more precious because when broken They were given to ones like no-longer-Jeddiel. He liked to take Them apart, to see how They worked, to see what made Them so special.
"She's in a mood," the albino was saying, not bothering to be gentle with hands or words. "I think you're going to hurt in the morning."
Ah, but he always hurt. Always, always, every moment of every hour of every day of every year of every decade since that fatal, terminal, all-condemning moment of weakness which had lead him here. He hurt with the thousand razorblade-needle-knifepoints of shame and remorse and fear.
They say it's not the falling, but the landing that's the killer. He knew the fall was worse, because you could see the ground coming up to meet you, big and round and about as friendly as a handful of red-bellied black snakes. And afterwards you ached with every fibre of your being, body-and-soul, until you thought you'd come apart at the seams and spill whatever life-force the Father of All had poured into you out on the wind.
The landing itself was relatively painless by comparison.
"Here he is," and he is thrown down on the cold-as-ice marble which bruises his hands and makes his knees ache. It's yellow, veined with pink. He's fairly certain marble isn't supposed to be that colour, but she (and his bones crack when he thinks of her) can do as she likes when it comes to trivialities of that kind.
The shick-shick-shick of her skirts makes him shiver. It is as if his skin knows what's to come and is trying to desert him before it can be terrorised.
"Ahhhh," comes her slow, soft, sweeter-than-the-apple-which-began-it-all voice. "You've been drinking, my love."
He hunches in on himself, thinking small, insignificant thoughts where she can't hear him. I'm not here, I'm not real, none of this is me, none of it matters, oh, please Lord, why aren't You listening? Pleaseohplease answer me, answer me! Where did You go? Why can't I hear You? What do I do, what do I DO? And the liquor cushions him against what is to come, because if he was sober he would be too terrified to think in words, only in the single-syllabled language of Fear.
"Oh, do get up."
He tries to stand, lurching, having lost his gracefulness with his sobriety.
She's smiling. "Poor, poor Ruan. You smell terrible, darling, and you look worse. I love it."
She pushes the overlong locks of hair out of his eyes and smiles. There are teeth in that smile, carefully hidden. This is the Game.
"Pretty, Fallen thing," she teases, her hands soft this time, warm and comforting, stroking circles on his nervous flesh which remind him that, for everything else she is, she's as beautiful as an eclipse. And as frightening. "You pretend and pretend," she sings in a voice like crystal and wine, "and lie to yourself, and then it all comes back, doesn't it? Because now you're one of us, and you still haven't grown into your new self. You keep trying to play the harp, instead of the pipe-organ."
Her arms around him are soft and brown and familiar, with the warm rising scent of saffron and wild thyme, and a hint of frankincense that makes him think of dark places deep in the earth where rubies and emeralds are born. His hands are full of silken hair, black like her eyes, shiny like her eyes, but not as brittle or filled with unspoken threats. She makes his heart feel hard, heavy, empty, and small-as-a-cigarette-burn.
"Run, run, run, darling Ruan, but you never run far enough, and you never can. Your enemy is here," and she traces a circle on his chest that flames warm and comforting against his skin. Skin? What happened to his shirt? "And we want to help you. We all know how you feel, so lost, and confused, and needy. But you won't let us in, not in here," her nails dig into the flesh over his heart, scoring deep lines. "And it frightens you, when something reminds you how fragile and insignificant the mortals are, how easily snuffed out. How much you enjoy using them to get What You Want."
She is the kind of person who can speak in capitals. From somewhere beneath the grappa, a rebellious thought rears its head. You don't know what I want.
She smiles. It doesn't touch her eyes.
"You want what we all want." Warm, always warm, and hot, like a live coal pressed against his chest, a pulsing sort of heat that blazes in time with his heart, or keeps the time for his heart to beat to. "You want the Rapture."
"No," he despairs. "No, no, no, n-"
And she kisses him.
The first time she kissed him he thought it was love. The warmth, the softness, the enveloping beauty, the feeling of belonging, the need, the need, the flaring of something in his blood which made him want to scream 'Yes! This is it! I have found it!' all pointed (he thought) to Love.
He learned better.
Now there is still that moment, that flash of homesick-hopefulness, that tearing of something loose in his chest, but it flies away over the ocean of disgust, hatred, fear, anger, despair, miserable-all-encompassing-soul-destroying-frantic lust and grappa.
He sinks into her arms and her bed and her body, hiding behind the drink, trying not to look, to watch, to remember, because before morning he will hate himself for this and try to drown it in something worse - because, the last thing she'll ask of him will be a favour. Something small. Something easy. Something red.
And he'll do it. And he'll enjoy it. And after, when he realises what he's done, she'll laugh and say it is only a step closer to the Rapture, which is, after all, the fusion of self and self-purpose, the complete knowledge of ones self and reason for being, and the joy of existence.
He hates himself. He loves her. And it strikes him as ironic that, while once he could have loved her in perfect love and perfect trust, he never would have, and now that the love is a stained and torn and ruined, ruined thing that bloodies his hands, he can't help but love her with a whole-hearted, broken-hearted yearning.
She knows what he is now better than himself. She has him up against the wall of his failure.
Every time they do this she twists the barb a little deeper, and tonight she names him at the moment of abandon, "RAMIEL!" shattering even that transient satisfaction into shards of self-pity and self-hatred and self-fucking-abnegation, leaving him breathless and lost-without-a-trace.
"Oh, come, darling," she purrs in his ear, slicing away the comforting fugue of homemade spirits with her fingernails as she brushes the tears from his cheeks. "Sometimes you have to kind to be cruel."
He could kill her. Cut her open and write sonnets in the bright ink of her veins. But it isn't that simple.
Nothing is ever that simple.
>>>> Lisa/ WishBunny's challenge: "You're way too harsh on Ruan [Lin]. He never gets to play hero, and Jules is hugely cruel to him, [with the exception, I might add, of the whole Salt Earth story which has since been cut from the sequence] which is completely unfair since Ruan [F]ell for philosophical reasons rather than because he is inherently evil. I want to see inside his head for once and see what makes him tick. He's by far the most compelling char from the Julian Saga, especially considering his relationship with Astarte. Who is, btw, almost as annoying as Virgil. [subsequent comments about Astarte have been removed because I think Lisa is full of shit =P] "Write me a purplish Ruan piece where he's angst-ridden and miserable about the [F]all, because personally I don't see him as a voluntary member of the HellCorps. And I want to see Astarte not being just a Lanfear clone. And no Julian. And I want it to the tune of a Tori Amos song, preferably something from Pele. Oh, and implied sex. Because I have to live vicariously through your writing." Well, sorry, Lisa, I wrote this to the Whitlams' Up Against the Wall (as if Ruan would be caught dead listening to Tori!), and I never did think Astarte was a Lanfear clone so I can't not write her that way. And I snuck in a Jan Din/Jeddiel cameo because I know how much you hate him. ^_^ It could be worse, you know, I'm guessing there's more between Jeddiel and Ruan than meets the eye ... *ducks*