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For one honeyed moment, suspended in a slow syrupy bubble and sticking to the edges of his smile, Scar forgot exactly where he was and what he was doing. His mind simply spread its hands and dropped its thoughts. Fear and doubts and worries scattering in favour of thinking just one thing:
Grian was gorgeous.
Shrieking, howling, screeching like he’d grown fangs. A smudge of blood crusting on his lower lip. Laughing shrilly in victory for all the world to hear as he threw himself from the upper floors and stumbled down shaky steps to see the body in person. Scar was already there, having marvelled at the sight of a head perfectly caved in by shattered dripstone, blood and brain on his shoes. Now that marvel was given to the sweetened sight of Grian’s ecstasy.
There was a heady feeling, dilating in Scar’s chest, swelling until it pressed into his ribs and up into his throat. His grin broadened. His teeth sharpened. He wondered, deliciously intoxicated on Grian's delight, if Grian also felt this sensation. Shared between them as vivid and real as the sand and sun. A complete and overwhelming adoration.
He opened his mouth to say it, to confirm its existence between them. I love you. I adore you. I want to die with you so entwined that nobody could pick our bones apart.
He didn’t get the chance.
That was when the moment—the slow sticky bubble of unending time—popped. Shattered. Fractured.
The smile slid off Grian’s face like sloughing skin, replaced by panic as raw as the flesh underneath. Something so distraught it was better suited for a rabbit than a falcon. Before Scar could blink, Grian was gone and out of the base, shoving past every other red life clamouring to see the gore.
Scar stood there. Kept standing there. Dragged his eyes up from Ren’s body to the red sweater vanishing into the forest. His own smile sat idle on his face, waiting a patient moment, as his fingers curled into the rough calluses of his own hands.
Grian had killed a man.
Grian had killed a man, and instead of revelling in shrieking laughter, instead of throwing open his arms to share the resplendence with the world, instead of perhaps grabbing Scar’s hand to dance with him until their minds went so wild their lips and teeth met… Instead of all that, Grain left like killing a man meant nothing at all.
Scar had one perfect merciful moment of not understanding. Then his smile dropped entirely.
Grian had not killed one person. He had killed two, and his desperate heartbeat, his shock of adrenaline, was already clogging up Scar’s arteries until Scar’s skin was singing with a foreign and frankly disgusting sort of panic. An ugly, misplaced grief that he had to swallow back as it welled up from Grian’s throat to his.
Rigidly, he took one step out of the muck of splattered brains and then another. He followed after Grian with a great sort of reluctance and own personal horror as if the forest were the gallows looming overhead.
Grian’s footsteps were easy to follow, bloody as they were. They trampled the grass and broke the foliage in their haste.
BigB’s body was sprawled in a mess on the ground not much farther from the base that was now Ren’s grave. His head was an unrecognizable mash of meat and skull. He was dead enough to not even have the courtesy of twitching.
Grian had already thrown himself into the dirt at BigB’s side, hands moving to hold his face as if there was a face left to hold. Blood soaked his clothes where he kneeled and yet he didn’t seem to notice, staring at BigB with an unblinking intensity. He finally reached forward. Stopped. Reached again. Gently traced the edges of what remained of the jaw. Stopped entirely and stared at the mess. Licked his lips.
His other hand dragged down to the chest, pressing flat where the ribcage turned into soft stomach. His talons curled, punctured, broke through down to the knuckle, and that was when Scar realized exactly where he recognized the expression on Grian’s face.
In the boiling heat of the desert sun washing over the sand all those lifetimes ago, how many times had Scar seen a setup like this? A kill, a laugh, a beautiful look in Grian’s eyes like no other, that made Scar’s heart skip a beat and his breath catch. How many times had he seen Grian picking over the gory wreckage with an absent air, talons digging in, heavy wings flaring out in his own eagerness.
How many times had Grian eaten him?
Torn open Scar’s ribcage with a shaky desperation and nauseating yearning. Pried at the still-beating heart and eased it out with the aorta cut and blood pooling freely into the cavity left behind. Opened up his mouth with his lips peeled back and bit into the thick muscle all the way to the gums. Ripping it apart in a spray of blood that flooded down his chin and stained the entirety of his front, dripping onto Scar’s own face before he died to the sight of Grian eating his still-warm heart like it was a juicy and ripened fruit?
Ha. Just once. But Scar would never ever forget it.
Now he was watching Grian do the same for someone else. A different body. A different heart. As if it was just as sweet, just as plump and lovely, as Scar’s had been. As if that moment had meant nothing at all.
Being jealous of a corpse was a foreign and frankly embarrassing feeling, but it itched beneath Scar’s skin nonetheless as he just stood there. Watching. Leaning on his cane while his fingers tapped out an impatient beat. Lips curling into his own miserable sort of smile.
It was methodical, the way Grian slitted the skin of the stomach beneath the ribcage, before prying upwards and snapping the bones. He sliced through the strings of fat holding it all together, until the chest cavity sloughed open, revealing where the heart sat still and useless. An ugly thing. Made of thick muscle and rubbery tubes. A frankly terrible heart if Scar had ever seen one. Grian was already cutting the aorta which wept congealing blood that filled the cavity and overflowed into the grass around him.
By now Scar’s own hands were aching, his nails throbbing with the subtle pain of breaking all that bone and tearing all that muscle, until one of the nailbeds bled.
The only thing that eased him was that the heart was held for barely a moment. Barely a thought of reverence, before it was devoured. Grian’s teeth were quick to sink into thick red muscle. The brutality of it was only matched by the vicious way Grian tossed his head back and swallowed the meat without chewing. His throat bobbed thickly, as his tongue thrashed against his teeth. His inhale after was a ragged gasp as he wiped the gore from his chin and plunged back into another violent, heady bite.
Scar forced himself to watch.
Maybe it was a self-loathing sort of punishment or maybe it was the simple fact that looking away would make no difference. Scar knew the blood that ran down Grian’s throat was thick and warm, the same way he knew the chewy meat was tough enough to make his teeth ache. He could feel each vivid sensation, each disregard for pain and frantic thirst, as if it was his own. He could have been there, kneeling in the grass with his knees soaked, choking down a heart with a reverent desperation until his stomach swelled.
There was no escape from watching Grian choose the heart of another. There was no escape from knowing every single sensation that Grian would’ve experienced devouring Scar all those lives ago, and knowing that it no longer meant a thing.
It was only when Grian was left with nothing in his twitching hands that Scar finally began to turn away. Grian gagged, nearly sobbed, but laughed instead. He was caressing the edges of what remained of BigB’s face again with awful, gentle talons.
Scar decided enough was enough and left completely.
He wandered for a moment, staring idly at idler trees, but eventually his nails started aching in a distinct way that meant Grian was fishing around BigB’s chest for more things to eat, and that cemented his decision on where his feet would take him. Back to where this dreadful string of moments began, to the crumbling base and the corpse still sitting there, rotting in its own blood and brains splattered over the stones.
“Call me crazy,” Scar said to Ren’s dead body. “But I’m starting to suspect that Grian doesn’t love me anymore.”
Ren, predictably, did not answer. It was unclear whether it was from an absence of life or a lack of mouth, although it could be both.
Scar tapped his cane, came to a decision, and eased himself down onto the ground, taking his time to be mindful of the gore and flick bits of skull and scalp out of his way.
“Here me out,” he continued, before Ren could get a word in. “You don’t remember this because you were dead again, but once upon a time Grian ate my heart while I was still alive. It was agony for me, bliss for him, a bit presumptuous of both of us. But it's not the sort of gesture that one forgets, and you’ll forgive me for perhaps misinterpreting it all this time. It just made sense that to be devoured is to be loved. I thought Grian loved me.”
Absently, his hand drifted up to his own mouth, trying to discreetly wipe away the drool before he realized it must be blood on Grian’s chin. His teeth were aching again with the effort of eating chewy meat, and his throat still felt warm and sticky.
“But now? He’s out there devouring another man. I think love is dead, Ren. Deader than you.”
He kicked at Ren’s feet to get some sort of response, but there was none except a muffled, unsatisfying impact. Scar sighed and settled for shifting closer, until he could lean over the chunks of face. He reached out and touched Ren’s jaw, and tried to will himself to feel anything.
“Do you think revenge tastes like raw meat?”
He didn’t wait for an answer before letting thin needle claws expand beneath his nails. The flesh was quick and butter-smooth to slice, right through the skin above the stomach and below the ribs. The bone took a bit more effort to snap, but he wrenched up the ribcage the same way Grian had, and neatly sliced away the fat until the chest cavity fell open.
Ren’s heart was deader than BigB’s. Pale and drained and unappealing. It still glimmered with slick tissues in the pooling fluids, and Scar reached out to sever the aorta and watch the dark blood flow limply out. It was cold now and congealing.
His aching claws pried out the muscle, finding the heart to be heavy and slick, a bit gross and difficult to grip. Scar had always preferred the liver or lungs, the texture popping between his teeth like fizzing candy. He wanted to know, however. To understand. So he opened up his maw until his jaw cracked and shoved his needled teeth down into raw and red meat. All the way to the gums until thickened blood slithered down his throat.
He pulled back, ripping out a chunk of muscle, and chewed a moment before swallowing. Disgusting, but he didn’t stop. Bite by bite he devoured the heart, hunched over as if that would save the gore from sloughing down his chin and sticking to his clothes and skin.
He wondered, choking on thick muscle, if Grian felt this. If he was clutching his own throat, gagging on unchewed pieces of meat, feeling the cold sludge of blood lather his mouth. He wondered if Grian was looking for him, desperate to see what he was eating. Or if Grian had already guessed, and was still picking through BigB’s miserable corpse, satiated in his decision and who he had chosen.
When there was no interruption, Scar moved on from the heart, fishing around for the liver because he deserved a treat today. Licked it down in a few bites, followed by the lungs that crackled and popped in his mouth. Finally, when there was nothing left that was worthwhile to eat, and when Grian still did not seek him out, Scar sighed and leaned heavily on the corpse, tracing an idle finger through the spilling guts.
“I was wrong,” he told Ren sincerely. “I don’t think this was revenge. Otherwise, revenge would taste like nothing at all, and how disappointing would that be?”
Then he burrowed his face against Ren’s shoulder, and let out a noise and a shudder that could have been a sob or a laugh. His hand fumbled to pat Ren’s jaw again.
“How about you eat me next time, and tell me if my heart is any sweeter. Then I’ll know if it meant something. If he loved me at all, or if he just enjoyed playing with his food.”
The corpse, predictably, had nothing else to say.