Chapter Text
This is all I know: Vessel is dead.
The silken moonlight offers no warmth upon my downturned cheek. It certainly does nothing to warm the cooling mess of limbs cradled in my arms. But through the stained glass of a rose window above, it does impart an argent glow to every streak and splatter and pool of blood.
The noble stone altar, the tapestry across the nearby lectern, every storm-gray tile beneath me — they’re all marred with so much moon-kissed scarlet, blood whose source I can’t distinguish. Vessel’s body in my lap? The other corpse to my left? I cannot say.
For the last eternity, I’ve been caught in the horrific trap of needing to look anywhere other than the split, raw flesh of his sweet and lovely throat, which gapes at me now like a crocodile’s awful smile, like the widening pit of hell itself. It’s a fount of crimson that falls in one continuous trickle onto my knee. The slick weight of where it’s saturated the fabric of my jeans stopped being warm some time ago.
For a moment, I think he’s trembling, maybe some wretched post-mortem aftershock. Then I realize he’s just jostled by the shake of my own hands. My arms. Every muscle, sinew, molecule of me. I can’t stop. And I can’t fucking look away.
“Bring him back.”
My voice is a hollow warble into the gargantuan belly of the cathedral, the stone walls too far to concede so much as an echo. I say it louder.
“Bring him back. I know you can, you fucking bastard.”
Vessel’s head sits at a horrible angle in the crook of my elbow, his blank gaze falling away towards the bloodied altar, his lips parted.
“I’ll do whatever you want,” I croak, “whatever you ask of me. I don't care. I’ll do it. Just bring him back.”
I wonder if, upon Golgotha, with her sixth and greatest sorrow splayed dead across her lap, Mary attempted such a cursed bargain as mine.
Then the sound starts somewhere in my chest, so soft that I hardly hear it until it’s rattling in my bones, a terrible hum like an approaching jet plane. A drawn-out syllable, like a deep sigh. Finally, the noise warps into words.
“He would not be the same.” It’s nowhere, and it's everywhere; it's right behind me and up in the rafters and inside my skull. “His mind has already started to float away like ash.”
“I don’t care,” I grit out. “I don't care. I’ll do anything.”
Is there a single thing more dumb and dangerous to say to a god, than a plea this desperate and depraved?
Sleep’s voice cannons through me again: “I will require another to serve in his place.”
Briefly, I remember Vessel covered in someone else's blood. Upright, alive, but looking haggard and battered and empty, slipping through our front door and passing through our kitchen like a ghost. I remember the gore smeared diagonal across his chest, along his jaw, caked under his fingernails. And, just like every other time he came home from serving Sleep, he wouldn't utter a word about it or even look me in the eye. He only disappeared to wash off all that blood and process whatever atrocity he'd committed this time.
“I’ll do it,” I say. “I’ll serve you. If it means you'll bring him back.”
“So insistent,” Sleep chides into my skull. Nonetheless, I receive my first instruction. “Take up his knife from the floor.”
I can't release Vessel’s shoulders and keep him in my lap, so I reluctantly let go of his legs and reach across him to snatch the glint of metal from the gory puddle it had found a home in. And I await Sleep’s next command.
“Little one, you’re going to have to set down his body for this.”
Beneath me, Vessel’s form hangs so limp, it’s like I’m holding him together, like without the bed of my knees and the clutch of my right arm, he’ll disassemble into long shards and clatter to the floor. But I fight every protesting cell of my body, and I ease him gently off my lap, supporting his lolling head until it reaches the pool of his blood beneath us.
This is going to bring him back, I assure myself as I release him. Whatever version of him is left in there. It’ll bring him back to this earth, back to me. Fuck everything else. I’ll set the world ablaze if Sleep says that’s what it takes. The siege of Carthage would look like child’s play.
Sleep’s voice slithers back into my head. I can't tell if he's speaking softer now, or if I'm just adjusting to the presence of a deity.
“If you truly wish to serve me,” comes his rumble and hiss, “you will declare it upon my altar.”
I glance at the slab of stone before me, beyond Vessel, frosted with a tablecloth that once was white before it took on so much scarlet.
“Doing so will bind you to me,” Sleep explains. “It will sanction your devotion, and it will strengthen my presence and power. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I urge, impatient. Didn't he say Vessel was already drifting away?
“Slice open your palm.”
The bite of the knife feels far away, like it's happening to someone else. Even in the dim moonlight, the fresh blood that blooms from my hand is more vibrant than the darkened pool around me.
“Very good, little one. Now approach the altar, and with your life force, mark it in my name.”
I step around Vessel, up to the mass of stone, and prod my opposite thumb into the prickling wound in my hand, and hesitate. Surely he doesn't mean scrawling ‘SLEEP’ across its edge like a child graffitiing a desk.
“Oh,” the god says at my pause, with what just might be some amusement, “you do not know the runes. You may reference the other body, which my last vessel marked in my name as his dying act.”
Vessel is dead. Vessel is dead. Vessel is dead.
I jostle my way through a sudden burst of nausea from that thought in order to study the five bizarre symbols smeared across the forehead of the other corpse.
Of course Ves had used a cursed orthography for the album materials. That motherfucker. How much other genuine magic has he threaded through our work without telling me? I add this to the running list of things to say to him. To whatever version of him comes back to me.
Compared to the shaky letters that I’ve begun to smear along the altar with my own blood, the ones in Vessel’s writing are neat, symmetrical, well-practiced. His slice across the stranger’s neck is much cleaner, too, than the jagged one in his own throat. This body shows no other wounds, to my eye, though there is a little smear of red around his mouth. He rests in his own ruby pool, with his glassy eyes pointed skyward and his arm strewn out beneath his head.
I wait for new horror to hit my gut from studying a second dead body. But all that curdles inside me is sour vindication at the sight of the man who killed Ves, murdered too. Instead of any human empathy, I’m only struck with the startling urge to spit upon his corpse.
My only new horror is directed at myself.
I finish the last rune.
“Now bring him back,” I growl.
“Your first moments as my new little vessel… and already so demanding.” The whoosh of a divine sigh fills my ears. “For me to be able to revive him, you must similarly mark his body with my name, in his own blood. To allow me access.”
Sleep is a condescending asshole, I’ve decided, and not someone I’m eager to grant ‘access’ to Vessel’s body or spirit. But we’re running out of time, I can feel it, and the shallow well of my mind sloshes too full of panic to have room for better ideas to seep in. So I heave Vessel back into my lap and swipe a forefinger into the clammy blood at his throat, a corporeal quill in corporeal ink.
To expose his forehead as my canvas, I tenderly guide his hair to the side with the edge of my fingers. I try not to think about how many times I’ve pictured this exact caress, try not to mourn the loving versions of it I never got to do — because I’m not here to grieve. I’m here to resurrect.
Hastily I smear the runes onto Vessel’s skin, like some fucked-up baptism.
“Good,” Sleep rumbles. “Now leave me with him.”
My head is shaking left to right before I even fully process his request. “Absolutely not.”
“You’re wasting precious time, little one.”
“So are you, because I’m not leaving him.”
That whoosh of frustration sweeps through again, but I seem to have won this one tiny battle, because Sleep says, “Then I shall begin.”
I watch every muscle in Vessel’s face for sudden signs of life. Will there be a holy glow? Will he float into the air? How the fuck does this work?
Will Sleep even do it at all, or have I been a fool?
Before I can languish a moment further, the runes across his forehead undergo the first shift — they evaporate like water. Next, the thick pool beneath us shrinks from the outside in. And then it’s happening all at once, as if someone hit rewind a second time to accelerate the reversal: bloodstains disappear from his neck and from my knee and from the shirt fabric on his chest and sleeves. A smear of red remains here and there, on his palms and across his stomach, but the rest vanishes entirely.
My pulse is hammering now as I watch the wound at his throat begin to stitch itself back together, closing from one edge to the other like a zipper. Each new change comes quicker than the last, an accelerating whirlwind of miracles I can barely comprehend, much less believe.
I nearly jump out of my skin when a wet, raucous gasp erupts from Vessel as he sucks in a lifetime’s worth of oxygen. His chest continues expanding until I think he’s gonna break a fucking rib, and his hands scramble at the floor, and my relief comes barreling through the opaque fog of my panic because I actually pulled it off and Sleep actually followed through and he’s back, oh god, he lives.
“Remember what I've done for you, my new little vessel,” Sleep purrs, but I barely hear it through the blare of shock in my temples from the sight before me.
Vessel’s stare is still a little glassy and unfocused as he begins to cough, a hand flying to his chest, which I reach for with my own. At the touch of our skin, his gaze starts to focus, and his coughs subside, and here he is in my lap, heaving shaky breaths, alive, alive, alive.
Slowly, from where his head is cradled in my arm, he glances around the stained glass above us, the rafters, every surface silver with gossamer moonlight. And then his eyes widen as his gaze lands on me.
My paralysis is equal parts disbelief, rhapsodic joy, and immense caution. Is this terrifying for him? Does he remember dying? What horrific existence is he waking up to?
We gaze at each other for another breath, another heartbeat, before I urge a small sound into my mouth.
“Welcome back,” I manage to say.
He gives the slow animatronic blink of a puppet, then glances down at his chest where our hands are still clasped together.
When his eyes swing back up to me, they're alight with something like wonder. A quiet smile pulls across his face, pure as silk. It’s like being looked at for the first time in my life.
The vacant bliss in his eyes is that of a newborn fawn. With a double pang of relief and pity, I realize he has no idea what's transpired here.
Vessel’s straining to sit up now, to take in our dimly lit surroundings, but his motions are shaky and weak, and there’s still a macabre scene nearby of the man whose blood did not disappear. So I gently pull Vessel up by the torso and guide him against my chest, pointing his gaze over my shoulder toward the empty pews instead.
I clutch his unsteady form against me, his back still unnaturally cool to the touch, his chest still fluttering with uneven breaths. His long arms lift, and I’m ready to release him if he pushes me away — but instead, slowly, as if he's figuring out how, they wrap around my back, mirroring my embrace of him. And it's so gentle, this touch, that I just might be the one to disassemble and shatter.
I hold him tighter.
“You’re safe now.” My words come out distorted beneath the weight of affection for this new creature in my arms. “You’re safe. I’ll protect you.”