Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The lights of the small village were just visible through the deluge of rain that was slowly soaking through Gabriel’s long, black coat and into his aching bones. He heaved a heavy sigh of relief and kicked his mare into a trot, squinting as the rain drove into his eyes. The thunder and lightning were behind him, slowly catching up as the howling wind spurred the storm on. His stomach rumbled as the lights drew nearer, appearing blurred and indistinct like marsh fires, drawing him in with their promise of a soft bed and hot meal. Gabriel really hoped they weren’t marsh fires, that would be a shit end to a shit week.

Luckily though, it was the inn the way-signs had promised he would find out in this farming backwater. He dismounted and led his mare into the barn, grimacing a little when he realised it was almost full. His heavy coat dripped into the damp hay as he made sure Midnight would be comfortable during her stay. Then he made his way back to the stable doors and looked out towards the lights of the inn and sighed. Gabriel pulled up the scarf that had hung below his chin until now and wrapped it around the lower half of his face, making sure that nothing below what was left of his nose was visible, before he strode through the unrelenting storm and into the tavern.

The warmth hit him like a wall. The fire was roaring and his cloak began to steam as he made his way through the large crowd drinking away the harvest’s end. There was a brief lull in conversation as he entered the room, but it picked up again the second he flicked his hood off and shook out his damp hair. There were a couple of curious looks cast his way when the people in the tavern—mostly farmers, a couple of mercenaries, and two young sorcerers judging by their robes—saw his scarred face, but Gabriel’s scars weren’t that out of the ordinary and they soon lost interest. Gabriel ran one of his gloved hands across his face, checking the position of the scarf (still ok) and then up through his hair, frowning a little at how long it was getting. He’d fix it later, for now, he pushed—or more, people just kind of shifted out of—his way to the bar.

The woman standing behind it looked like she could crush his head with one arm. She had to be in her forties but had the sleeves of her dress rolled up to show off her bulging biceps, blonde hair pulled back in a long braid down her back. She took one look at him and said, “we’re full. No rooms tonight.”

Gabriel resisted rolling his eyes, just his luck. “The barn?” he asked, resigning himself to smelling like a horse for the next week.

The woman shrugged, massive shoulders hiking up and down as if they were climbing mountains, or rather, they were the mountains. “You find room in there, you can sleep in there. I won’t charge. But you have to buy drinks.”

This time Gabriel did roll his eyes. “I’ll have a house meal and a whisky.” He grimaced as he counted his coins and added, “the cheap stuff.” Times were tough.

The woman frowned a little but poured him some precious liquid gold which he cradled in his gloved hands. She looked disappointed when he didn’t drink it, but turned from him and called out to the kitchens. When she turned back to him she crossed her arms. “Name’s Valeriya. Call me if you need something, stranger.”

Then she hustled off and came back shortly after with a bowl of stew. It looked hearty and it was hot so Gabriel didn’t bother to ask what kind of meat was in it. After that Valeriya left him alone to tend to the other patrons calling for drinks. He picked up the bowl and his whisky and made a beeline for the single empty table in the shadows of the far corner of the room, which was as far away from the fire as could be. Gabriel heaved another sigh as he settled in the cold chair. He flicked his eyes around the tavern and made sure nobody was looking as he pulled his hood up and the scarf down, taking a quick bite of the stew. The first mouthful burnt his tongue as he chewed fast, trying desperately hard not to let any of it escape through the shreds of his cheeks and lips, even as he swiped the scarf back over his face again, keeping it hidden. Ten years he’d had this mouth and for ten years he’d managed to consistently bite his tongue with the sharpened remains of his teeth. At least tonight there was consolation in the fact that the stew was hot and good, despite the mystery meat. And since he only bit his tongue once during the whole ordeal tonight, he counted it as a win that nobody noticed the black vapours escape through the scarf to join the shadows in his corner.

After he had scraped the bowl clean Gabriel sat back contentedly and eyed the rest of the room from underneath the shadow of his hood, sipping occasionally on his whisky. The two young sorcerers were huddled together and paying no mind to the rest of the room, while the rest of the room slowly got more and more boisterous as the night wore on. One of the farmers had got himself in an argument with one of the mercs and the two began to shout at each other. The farmer stood up, the merc following suit almost instantly. The farmer towered over her as the shouting continued and the merc took a step forward, hand on her weapon—

And suddenly Valeriya was there. She put a hand on each of the offending party’s shoulders and said vary quietly, “sit down.”

They sat down.

Gabriel smirked to himself and then yawned under the scarf, feeling the tissue of his shredded face stretch and then congeal back together again. Well, enough excitement for one night. He stood up just as the bartender settled back into her watchful post behind the bar. He made a detour over to her, deciding he may as well get answers tonight rather than wait around tomorrow.

“That was a good show over there,” he nodded behind himself to where the debate had settled back into the heated words stage.

“Pah,” the bartender waved one of her massive arms, almost knocking several bottles off the shelf, “Nikov should know better, the merc was the problem. At least she knows when not to push it. Now, what do you want? Another drink?”

“Actually, it’s the mercs I want to ask you about. Any work going that you know of?” Gabriel pushed his hood back a little, making sure she could see his eyes. People got nervous when they couldn’t see his eyes.

It was probably a useless gesture though, as he doubted Valeriya got nervous about anything. She looked at him for a moment and then tapped his empty glass. Gabriel sighed for what felt like the thousandth time that night and tossed a copper onto the counter. He waved away her attempts to refill the glass and met her eyes when she looked at him suspiciously.

“You got something wrong with your face?” she asked.

And he had had such a mediocre evening too. “Yes,” he replied, daring her to keep going with her nosy enquiry.

Instead her lips quirked up and she shrugged, “Tamor is two days north, it’s a trade town at the crossroads. Largest town before the week-long trip to Gibraltar up north through the mountains, or across to Mesa in the East if you fancy the desert at this time of yeat. You should be able to pick up some escort work there if you’re lucky. Bit late in the season though, not too many caravans departing just before the winter storms hit.”

Gabriel nodded his thanks and abruptly left her behind without another word. Gibraltar… the Northern Kingdom seat of power. There had been unsettling rumours about the city for the past couple of years and news from the north had been getting noticeably scarcer. It put a bad taste in his mouth. He supposed he’d try and get a caravan going south before one heading north if he could. He didn’t particularly want to end up in Gibraltar, but, well, he also didn’t want to starve either.

And there, in the back of his head a voice whispered, deep and low and dark and hungry, you know you won’t ever starve again. As Gabriel clumped his way to the door of the tavern and the waiting storm he mentally strangled the voice and stuffed it down into its prison at the base of his stomach where the hunger always rumbled. He wouldn’t starve no, but he also found the alternative worse than starving so he was going to take some work.

The rationalisation helped.

Just as Gabriel reached for the doorhandle, preoccupied with his own thoughts, it swung open. A blast of cold, wet air blew around a large silhouette, highlighted for a brief moment by a flash of lightning from the storm beyond.

Blue. Eyes as blue as a summer sky looked at him from underneath one of the largest hats Gabriel had ever seen. Its wide brim was sagging under the weight of a storm’s worth of water and crowning the top of the hat was the saddest, most sodden feather Gabriel had ever set his eyes upon. The poor owner was not faring much better than the hat. The stranger’s fine clothes were ruined and hung like limp rags from his solid shoulders. At least someone else had had to trudge through that fucker of a storm too. Though, Gabriel judged that some poor soul was about to have themselves reassigned to a night in the stable in order to accommodate the sodden noble.

Gabriel waited for the noble to move out of the way—as he was accustomed to people doing when they met his six-foot stature in the middle of the doorway. And waited. But the man just stood there. Another flash of lightning revealed that the blue eyes were wide, whites showing. Scared? Or surprised? Gabriel wasn’t sure, but he noted that the noble had a young face, his ice-white skin split by an enormous scar running from his left eyebrow across to his right cheek.

“Move,” Gabriel growled out, deep voice splitting between the shards of his teeth.

The noble jerked in his spot and took a step backwards, the firelight from inside flickered across the noble’s face and Gabriel thought he saw something akin to recognition there. But he brushed past the man before he had a chance to see anything else. His boots splashed in the mud as he stalked from the tavern to its adjacent stables, breathing a sigh of relief when he slammed the door shut against the howling wind. A couple of horses snorted in surprise but Gabriel crooned at them and they soon calmed down.

At least it was warm in the stables. The loft was almost comfortable and though it wasn’t ideal, Gabriel had slept in far, far worse places in the last ten years. He shrugged off his enormous black coat and lay it over the wooden loft. Its armoured back was not the most comfortable thing to sleep on but neither was hay.

As he lay there in the dark, he slowly tugged the black leather gloves off, feeling his hands coalesce into claws and then back into fingers, free from their prison. He laced them together as if in prayer, but more for the practicality of not having his own hands disappear during the night—that had been an ordeal he never wanted to happen again. The sensible side of him said that it would probably be for the best if he slept with the gloves on tonight, the whiny side of him told him that his skin would be all flaky and nasty for the next week if he did. Besides, if he got an escort contract he was probably resigning himself to a week of that anyway.

He listened to the whiny side and decided that since he was a very light sleeper and would wake at the softest footfall, it shouldn’t be a problem.

He turned to face the wall, tugged the scarf tight around his ruined face and closed his eyes.

Jack stood there. The wind drove the rain into his back, howling in protest and matching his own internal screaming as a dead man brushed past him and out into the storm.

Gabriel is alive.

The whisper began in the pit of his stomach and drove itself upwards.

Gabriel is alive.

Jack’s breath hitched as the realisation hit his lungs. He didn’t need to breathe, but god, he couldn’t manage to do it now for appearances sake.

Gabriel is alive.

It wormed its way into his dead heart. Cold and forgotten for ten long years.

He took another step backwards, feeling the jolt of movement split his body and still his reeling mind. Then the questions began. They tumbled over one another, vying for the top of the pile like starving dogs after a scrap of meat. What was he doing here? How was he here? How was he still alive? Where has he been all these years? And a lesser one… a quiet voice at the back of his head, why didn’t he recognise me?

And that wasn’t all. Jack could smell Gabriel. Would know his smell anywhere and now that he was… what he was, his sense of smell was far stronger than before. But Gabriel had always smelled of cinnamon and smoke. Ash and the fresh forest after rain. Jack breathed in, and it was Gabriel because that was all the same. But there was also something else lingering in the air. Something underneath the scent, like fire without the warmth. It wasn’t that Gabriel smelled like the sick or dying, or the painful smell of age. He just smelled like wrongness.

Jack watched the man in the long dark coat let himself into the stables adjoining the tavern. Jack swallowed, he still held his back the same way he had all those years ago.

“Oi, close the door!” someone shouted from inside the tap room.

Jack shook his head, the water sashaying off his hat and cast one last look at the stables. Surely Gabriel wasn’t going to leave in this weather? Surely not. Jack took a deep breath, smelling the scent he thought was long, long gone and decided that even if he did leave, Jack was a more than accomplished tracker nowadays.

He wasn’t about to let Gabriel just leave him again.

Because Gabriel is alive.

He finally strode into the tavern, apologising to the inhabitants inside with a sweeping bow and practiced smile. The one that stretched the scar across his youthful face.

Jack crept into the stables. He was quiet and fast enough that he didn’t even wake the horses. His feet made no sound as he made his way through the stalls to stand underneath the loft where Gabriel was sleeping, breath light as a feather.

Jack clutched his hat in his hand, knuckles going white as he took a deep breath, in time with Gabriel. He’d managed to charm the bartender into telling him where Gabriel was headed and it appeared as though Gabriel had hit hard times. They were in the same sinking ship there. Jack ran a hand down his face as he thought about the last couple of years. Not as bad as when the war ended—he shivered, nothing would ever be as bad as that—but Jack was tired.

Tired of this not-life he had been living.

But Gabriel is alive. His love was sleeping above him, in the hayloft of a stable, in a backwater town in the middle of nowhere. How? How?

Jack eyed the opposite side of the hayloft and then moved, one foot pushed off, another on a stall door, a hand briefly lifting him up and onto the little platform. Silent. He disturbed only the air.

He crouched there, and peeked across the dark stables to where Gabriel had chosen to sleep. His eyes saw everything. Vision painfully sharp during the night, he saw better now than he did during the day.

Gabriel lay curled on his side, legs pulled up and arms locked in front of him. The wide muscles of his back held the same contours, Jack could trace every familiar line, stretched and visible beneath his tangled shirt. Gabriel had taken his coat off, but had left the long scarf wrapped around his lower face. Jack could see his hair, the dark curls longer than Gabriel had used to keep it and, with a jolt that almost felt like it would kick-start his dead heart, Jack realised there were white streaks amongst the black.

So not only was Gabriel not dead, but he had also aged.

Jack dropped his gaze to his own hands and slowly lowered himself down to sit with his knees drawn up to his chest. He looked down at his pale skin. Scarless. Wiped clean ten years ago. He brushed a finger over his knuckles, lamenting the lost history there. The nicks and scratches from years’ past were gone and he was never going to receive any new ones. The only thing he could do was get retribution for what he had lost.

Or… what he had thought he had lost.

Because Gabriel is alive.

Jack lifted his eyes to watch the man he had thought he would never see again until someone deigned to wipe his miserable existence from this planet. He felt them then. The tears. The burn of his throat, a familiar feeling, but one he had long given up on after those first few years. His lungs tightened and he stopped breathing instead of giving himself away. He wanted nothing more than to let out the heaving sob that cowered in his chest. But he would wake Gabriel.

And Gabriel didn’t know who he was.

Because no matter how familiar those eyes were—those eyes he had spent ten years dreaming of. Those eyes that had looked at him with rage, pain, fire and love. Those eyes he had lost himself in during the best years of his life—they had always known him more than he knew himself.

And the eyes of the man sleeping across from him did not know him at all. 

Gabriel dreamed of blue. He wished it was pleasant.

But he tried to claw his way towards it as the darkness behind him surged forward. Its tendrils wrapped around his arms pulling him backwards, away from the sky.

Ice blue. Like the glaciers in the north. It shone over him. Calling. And everything in his body told him to fight for it. Because the blue was safe.

And Gabriel did. He used his body, gathered the wisps and smoke that were slowly being consumed by the dark. He gathered them in and reached towards the blue. Asked it to take him in, hold him in its warmth.

But he wasn’t strong enough. The darkness reached out instead and caressed him in its loathing. And he knew he couldn’t fight it. Knew how all this went. But Gabriel always fought it.

Because giving in to the monster waiting in the shadows was not an option.

And tonight, like all nights, the shadow was hungry. He had neglected to feed it.

And so, it fed on him.

Gabriel screamed. And shot up, eyes wide and breathing hard, scarf coming loose around his ruined face, teeth biting into his shredded lips, black vapour pouring into the air, ever hungry. Gabriel clutched his stomach, quelling the darkness that hid inside, that hungered for the world. And slowly. Slowly his breathing calmed, and he hushed his bleeding mind.

Just a nightmare.

That’s what he always told himself. He put his head in his ever-changing hands and dragged them down his face, slowly waking up, looking around—

Blue. Bright as day, the eyes stared at him across the yawning abyss of the stable. Tears broke apart the pale skin of the man’s face, glistening in the dark, more so than the scar that split it in half. And without thinking Gabriel reached towards the blue.

He blinked—

And they were gone. Not a whisper or creak. Not a rustle of hay or breath of air to ever tell him that the man had ever been there in the first place. Gabriel was just left reaching towards an empty hayloft.

He flicked his eyes around the room as he lowered his arm, flexing his fingers and feeling them settle back into his skin. “Hello?” he whispered to the dark stable, then shook his head. No one could move that fast. He was probably still waking up.

Gabriel slowly lay back on his coat again, trying not to groan at the way his back creaked in protest or the way the deep, heavy pain settled back into his bones again. He heaved a sigh and listened for any movement, but there was only the deep breaths of the horses below. The storm was gone at last.

Good. That meant he could be gone first thing in the morning. He didn’t particularly want to run into those blue eyes again. He shivered, then tightened the scarf around his neck once again. It was suffocating, but at least there was some comfort in hiding himself away.

Gabriel stared out into the dark and tried not to think of blue.

Chapter Text

Gabriel watched the stables slowly grow lighter and lighter. The pale day crept under the barn door, bringing with it the threat of rain. Gabriel could feel it in the ache of his bones. Not just the constant shifting pain that had always been there, but something deeper.

He was getting old.

He blew a white strand of his long hair out of his eyes and sighed, stretching out his back like a cat. He tugged on his gloves with distaste and once again fixed the scarf tied around his face. Then he dusted off his black leather coat and swung it on.

His boots landed with a crunch on the floor and Gabriel gritted his teeth against the sharp pain in his ankles. He definitely wasn’t a young man anymore. Not that he had ever been young. He’d just managed to grow older in this body for the last ten years.

Endure. That’s all he could do.

Besides keeping himself fed…

He made his way over to Midnight’s stall, gave her a breakfast of grain from a trough in the back, then brushed and saddled the mare.

A push and heave later and he was settled astride, ready for the journey ahead. He had enough food to get him to Tamor and from there it shouldn’t be too hard to pick up some work and replenish his supplies.

As he rode out of the stables, Gabriel glanced back at the tavern noting the rusted sign that he hadn’t seen during the storm last night. His broken lips cracked a smile as he left The Broken Scythe behind.

Gabriel dragged Midnight’s head around to face the North and put his heels in the mare’s side. The village didn’t stir, save for a pale man whose face was hidden in the shadow of an enormous hat, bright blue eyes watching the black horse canter off into the dawn.

The roads were quiet this late in Autumn. The only people Gabriel passed were the last few desperate farmers trying to get their late harvest to town before the winter set in. It had been a difficult year for everyone. Gabriel had come from the Southern Kingdoms, where even the most fertile lands had struggled with bad weather and an outbreak of crop blight that, for some reason, even the most experienced sorcerers could not stop. There were rumours of corrupted magic—sorcerers turned necromancers, and some of the lesser fiefdoms had banned any sorcerers from entering their borders. Dark times, indeed. It had meant that prices for food had soared, but it also ensured that mercenary work would be well paid if he managed to get some.

After having a hasty midday meal of dried fruit and stale bread, Gabriel decided to avoid the next village in favour of travelling a few more miles before sundown. The road grew quiet, the only sign of life he saw was a snowy-white owl sleeping amongst the trees. The sky had stayed hidden all day but had neglected to rain, which he was thankful for. Gabriel was almost glad to be spending the night camping, he much preferred the solace of the forest. Besides, the inn might be full and he didn’t want to end up in the stable again. The only thing he was missing out on was a hot meal.

Which was almost worth the trip to the village. He sighed. Stale bread and jerky would have to do. At least he had some dried tea leaves he could boil for something hot.

Twilight deepened the shadows across the road and Gabriel was about to try and find a place to stop for the night, stomach rumbling uncomfortably, when he spotted a silhouette of a man leaning against one of the tall pine trees that bordered the road. The silhouette wore an enormous hat. With a feather in it.

Gabriel narrowed his eyes.

He stared at the figure, slowly growing larger, his keen eyes picking out the shape of the man from the doorway last night. The stranger looked much more respectable with dry clothes on and the feather on his ridiculous hat had even perked up a bit. As he approached, the man didn’t look up at him, he just casually examined his fingernails as if he did this every night at this particular part of the road through the forest.

Gabriel ground his sharpened teeth, feeling them click against each other. He had no idea what kind of bullshit magic this man had used to show up ahead of him. He had no horse tied close by, nor had Gabriel seen the man pass him on the road today. And this was the only road through the forest. He knew for a fact that long-range teleportation was impossible. The only other magic he could think of was shapeshifting, but real shapeshifters no longer existed. Shapeshifting magic had become dark and tainted—something akin to necromancy. He knew that this man couldn’t be a shapeshifter because he showed no signs of the darkness that Gabr—

Anyway, he wasn’t a shapeshifter.

Gabriel was almost upon the man now, Midnight had maintained her walk all day and he kept her at that same pace. He stared down at the man as he passed him. And the man lifted his head to stare right back at Gabriel, piercing blue of his eyes the only colour in the fast-fading light.

The man’s face lit up with a smile, as if he had only just noticed Gabriel, and wasn’t waiting for him at all. A flash of what Gabriel could only call joy lined the man’s face before he carefully wiped it clean again and opened his mouth.

“Oh hello, fancy seeing—

Gabriel rode straight past him.

He gleaned some satisfaction from the way the voice—deep but youthful—cut off with an indignant choke. Gabriel felt his lips twitch upwards beneath the scarf.

Well. That was that then. He plodded on, resigning himself to travelling a little further in the dark to get away from the blue-eyed stranger. His keen night-eyes should be enough to pick out any dangerous spots on the road for Midnight.

He heard a throat clear to his left.

Gabriel shut his eyes briefly and took a deep breath. When he opened them again he stared straight ahead and continued riding forward with renewed determination.

This was beginning to get annoying. People didn’t follow him. Ever. The big fuck-off coat and face hidden in the cowl of his hood was usually enough to stop them from even approaching him. Apparently, this idiotic noble didn’t get the message. Though Gabriel was doubting the nobility title he had assigned the man. Granted, nobles were the only breed of people stupid enough to think of following him, but this man didn’t have a horse, or a retinue.

He was just an idiot in noble’s clothes.

“Um hello,” the voice drifted up to him again. “I couldn’t help but notice—

Gabriel reigned in Midnight and turned in the saddle to stare down at the stranger—who had not only managed to keep up with Midnight’s strides, but had apparently done so with ease, since he wasn’t even out of breath. The sudden stop caught the stranger off-guard and he took an extra step before he smoothly turned on one heel and looked up at Gabriel.

The smile made a hesitant return and the blue eyes looked expectant as he opened his mouth—

“Who are you and what do you want?” Gabriel cut in roughly. He pulled the scarf up slightly, making sure that it was firmly covering everything.

A flash of something crossed the man’s face. Pain? Hurt? Gabriel couldn’t put a name to it and it was gone to fast, replaced again by the nervous smile.

“I…” the man began then quickly changed tack, “my name is Jack, and I couldn’t help but notice that you must be looking for somewhere to set up camp for the night.”

That…was not what Gabriel was expecting. What the hell was this man playing at? Gabriel stared at Jack incredulously for a moment before he put his heels into Midnight and walked her forward again, leaving the strange idiot behind.

Jack had to run a few steps to catch up to Gabriel again, “Uh, just that if you were, looking for a place to stop for the night,” Jack continued, apparently oblivious to Gabriel’s now-twitching eye, “there is a super nice glade just back there.” A rustle of clothing probably meant that Jack was pointing somewhere behind them. Gabriel wouldn’t know, he just stared straight ahead.

 “And, if you were thinking of making a fire, it’s hidden… from sight. Just a great spot… to camp for the night.”

Gabriel had no idea how Jack was completely oblivious to the go-the-fuck-away body language messages he was sending.

“Soft leaves to sleep on… if that’s your thing. I mean, I wouldn’t know, I’m—

Gabriel stopped his horse again. This time Jack was ready and stopped with him to look up expectantly.

“Are you inviting yourself to camp with me?” Gabriel asked.

Jack’s face went from nervous expectancy to a terrified panic so fast that Gabriel got whiplash just watching it. Jack tried to laugh it off, but choked a little, “Uhh, only if you want me. Well, not like want me, want me. More like two is better than one, right? But that’s not to say one isn’t fine company…”

“You didn’t think this through, did you?” said Gabriel. The second-hand embarrassment was getting a little much, even for him.

“Uh,” Jack paused for a little too long.

“Why are you following me?”

Jack swallowed, then shrugged slowly. “I was… curious.”

“Stay curious. I travel alone.” He watched the pained expression briefly cross the youthful features before Jack looked away.

Gabriel began to walk Midnight forward once again. He was about to breathe a sigh of relief when he heard the footsteps beside him once again.

He looked down. Jack was walking next to him, barely any effort contained in his long strides.

Gabriel continued on for another three strides before he said, from behind gritted teeth, “what are you doing?”

Jack began to examine his fingernails again. He flicked a non-existent bit of dirt out from underneath one of them. He blinked at Gabriel’s question, as if he had forgotten he was there. “Huh? Oh, I’m sorry, I’m just travelling alone too. Didn’t realise there were others on the road this late.”

Gabriel liked to think he had his rage under control. He’d had ten long years to work on it. But never, never in those ten years had he wanted to murder someone as much as he wanted to kill Jack right now.

Ok. That wasn’t true. But Jack was coming in at a close second.

Midnight stumbled a little, hoof hitting a dip in the road Gabriel hadn’t been keeping an eye out for. Gabriel reigned her in and sighed.

Fine. Fine. He would find a spot to camp and this imbecile would invite himself along and then when Gabriel decided he was hungry, Jack would surely take one look at him and run for the hills.

That was the hope, in any case.

There was another option. One that the voice from the pit of his stomach whispered up to him. The one that he no longer took unless it was absolutely necessary. Because feeding that beast was dangerous. And the idiot with the blue eyes probably wasn’t worth it. At least for now.

He dismounted abruptly, bringing himself down to where Jack had taken a few steps back to give him some space. With a start, Gabriel realised they were almost the same height. Jack was perhaps an inch taller.

Gabriel looked at Jack for a few moments. Jack stared back. Gabriel took a deep breath and said very slowly, “are you going to show me where your stupid glade is?”

The blue eyes widened as Jack jerked his head up, feather on his hat bouncing around wildly. A brilliant smile lit up his face as he turned from Gabriel and motioned back the way he had come. “It’s not far.” He set off, leaving a nonplussed Gabriel looking down at himself and wondering what the hell he had done to warrant that kind of reaction.

Gabriel followed Jack slowly, leading Midnight along behind. Jack carried no bag, the only thing he had was the clothes on his back and the ridiculous hat. Was he some kind of master sorcerer? In Gabriel’s experience, the sorcerers he had met often had at least enough intelligence to stay out of his way.

No, this man probably wasn’t a sorcerer.

Then a particular thought hit him. He leaned forward and tried to peek at Jack’s ears from underneath the brim of the hat. But, despite his excellent night vision, he couldn’t see anything in the deepening shadows. Jack chose that unfortunate moment to turn around to check that he was following.

Their eyes met. “Uh, what are you doing?” asked Jack, one of his delicate eyebrows raised. It pulled on the enormous scar that streaked across his face.

Gabriel cleared his throat and straightened up. “Are you one of the fair folk?” he asked bluntly.

Jack laughed, like peels on a deep bell they rang out into the quiet forest. “No… no I’m not. Were you afraid I was about to lure you into my forest trap?”

Gabriel shrugged, feeling a little stupid, but also as if he had to defend himself. The fair folk were dangerous… to others anyway. “No, I wasn’t. Just that if it is a trap, you are luring in the wrong person.”

The eyebrow climbed a little higher. “Really now. Well, rest assured, I don’t have a fairy circle waiting for you.”

Gabriel tilted his head at Jack. “You a sorcerer?”

Jack snorted, “nope. Not a drop of magic in me.”

“Alchemist?”

“Uh, no.”

“Necromancer?” Necromancers weren’t born with magic, they tore it from the world instead. Jack didn’t look dark and tainted, but looks could be deceiving.

At that Jack wrinkled his face in disgust, and something like anger. “No. Now if you want to get to the glade tonight it’s through here.”

Jack began walking again, turning off the road and picking his way through the low brush. Gabriel began to follow again, if it was a trap his instincts would usually be shouting at him, but all was quiet. “How did you catch up to me?” he asked abruptly.

Jack didn’t turn around but there was a long pause before he said, “I’m a fast walker.”

“No one can walk that fast.”

Suddenly they were out of the brush and into a small, sheltered clearing. The crescent moon was just peeking out of the lazy clouds, slowly drifting away to let the heavens see the earth. Gabriel kept his eyes on Jack, catching the other man’s glance upward, a tiny frown crossing his features. Jack ignored Gabriel’s last comment and began to gather together some sticks for a fire. In no time at all he had laid out a little tepee ready for a flint and steel. It did not go unnoticed to Gabriel that he did all of this in the dark, with no hesitation in his movements.

After laying the final stick he looked up at Gabriel expectantly.

“You can see in the dark,” Gabriel stated, as if he were simply stating that the moon was shining tonight.

Jack’s face fell a little before he pointed out rather impolitely, “so can you.”

Gabriel sighed and decided to ignore that comment and any others forthcoming from Jack as he began to unsaddle Midnight, pulling off the saddlebags and rubbing her down.

Jack watched, and after a moment he came over and attempted to pat the mare’s nose, pulling his hand back sharply when she took a swipe at his fingers. He moved fast though and her teeth clicked over thin air, leaving Gabriel grinning underneath his scarf. His horse had the right idea.

“What’s her name?” asked Jack, crossing his arms to protect himself from further horse assault.

Gabriel patted her neck, “atta’ girl, Midnight.”

Jack snorted loudly, then muttered, “typical.”

Gabriel turn to him with a flat expression. “Excuse me?”

A brief moment of panic passed over Jack’s face, before he re-arranged it and gestured at Midnight stuttering. “Well, just that… um, your horse is black. And Midnight… is a pretty typical name for a black horse.”

Both Gabriel and Midnight were staring at Jack now, Gabriel briefly entertained the idea of flesh-eating horses. Maybe it would save him from any further interaction with this idiot if his horse would just eat Jack’s face.

After hobbling Midnight, Gabriel pulled out his flint and steel and struck it upon the little campfire. In no time at all they had a merry blaze going and Gabriel filled up his kettle with water for tea. He managed to locate the tealeaves and his cup, the lip of it carved in such a way that it made it easier to drink out of with his…mouth situation.

Gabriel looked at his cup and then up at Jack. “I only have one cup.” He waited, wondering if this was the moment Jack would reveal he had lied and was in fact a sorcerer, and then pull a horse and survival gear out of his ass.

But Jack shook his head from where he had taken a seat on the opposite side of the fire. “Don’t worry about me, I’m not thirsty.”

“Right,” Gabriel pinched out some of the leaves and sprinkled them in the kettle and then set it over the fire. “And I take it you don’t have anything to sleep on?”

Jack shifted his eyes away, “I don’t sleep much.”

“And you aren’t hungry? Not going to pull out a sandwich from underneath those fancy clothes.”

Jack bit his lip, “Uhh, no. No. Don’t worry about me. I ate at the last village before seeing you on the road.”

Gabriel didn’t know if Jack was even attempting to lie at this point. But at least he knew he was dealing with the worst liar in the entire kingdom.

“So. You walked all day. Managed to have a meal at the last village. Then found yourself ahead of me, without ever passing me on the road.”

Jack didn’t move, just stared at Gabriel and said slowly and precisely, “yes.”

Gabriel pinched the bridge of his nose. Unbelievable. “Do you just want to tell me what you are so we can get the introductions over with?”

Jack didn’t say anything. Didn’t look at Gabriel. Instead he took off his hat, revealing a head of ash white hair, messy in a way that looked mildly-attractive. Gabriel squinted, in fact, now that he actually had enough light to properly see him by, he realised that Jack was very attractive. Though perhaps a little young for him now. Gabriel winced internally, not that anyone would be remotely attracted to him in his state. The scar that split Jack’s face drew his eyes to it, but to be honest, Gabriel didn’t judge anyone by their scars, seeing as that would be hyper-hypocritical of him. If anything, it gave Jack a handsome roguish look. He would have had a pretty good healer close by to have survived a blow that left a scar like that.

The silence grew longer. Gabriel took out his sad dinner of hard bread and jerky and lay it out on the cloth it was wrapped in, content to wait.

Jack looked up at last, blue eyes reflecting the fire between them, piercing him, trying to see into him and figure out if he saw anything back.

Gabriel sighed then, knowing he wasn’t going to get an answer to his question. He decided to voice the thought that had sat in the back of his mind ever since he saw the stranger in the doorway of the inn. “You knew me.”

It was a statement, not a question, but Jack chose to answer anyway.

“I know you.”

Gabriel couldn’t help it. He laughed. It was a frail laugh, full of the shreds of himself that barely fit in one hand. He had given some thought to how he would react should he ever come across anyone from before. But seemingly, he hadn’t expected it to turn out quite like this. He looked at Jack and ran his tongue across his broken teeth, suddenly acutely aware of his broken face and shredded remnants of what he used to be.

Jack didn’t meet his look, instead he shut his eyes and Gabriel had a sensation that he was watching a man break, both on the surface and inside.

“You don’t know me,” Gabriel said quietly, feeling the words sour in his mouth. He knew no one. He was no one. Nothing. Just a shell. “I don’t care who I was before, but if you expect anything from me now, you can kindly fuck off. Your little reunion is a lost cause.”

Jack finally lifted his eyes, “so who are you now?” he challenged.

“No one,” he spat.

They stared at each other. Jack was the first to look away, something akin to shame flashing across his face before he looked down.

Gabriel ground his teeth. Who he was before hardly mattered to him. He had spent ten years trying to learn who he was. He owed nothing to the man he had once been.

He had given up that gambit a long time ago. Whoever he was before had gotten himself into a shitty situation that Gabriel had been the one to wake up to. That wasn’t to say it didn’t make him curious, he had just decided that he was better off not knowing why he had a ruined face and an untamed darkness living inside of him.

The sound of the kettle whistling shattered his thoughts and with a sigh, Gabriel lifted it from the fire, the leather gloves he wore protecting his hands. Not that it made a difference, his hands weren’t exactly human anymore, maybe he could scare Jack off by just taking off the gloves and have his hands drift apart. It would probably make eating difficult though, and Jack would get to see the main attraction in a moment.

“Who was I to you?” he asked quietly, picking at his scarf, feeling his stomach rumble in anticipation.

Jack flicked his eyes up to Gabriel again. “No one,” he whispered. His voice was ragged, raw, and it made it blatantly obvious that whoever he was before had been someone important to this man.

Gabriel swallowed, mouth suddenly dry. He steeled himself and muttered, “oh, well in that case, what I’m about to show you shouldn’t be that bad. Fair warning though, I suggest you look away now if you don’t want to throw up whatever you ate at the last village.”

Jack jerked his head up narrowing his eyes in confusion. “What?”

Gabriel clicked his teeth together and began to unwind his scarf. “I’m going to eat now.” He paused before revealing his face, waiting to see if Jack would look away. He didn’t, so Gabriel unlooped the last bit of the scarf and breathed in through his broken nose, feeling the heat of the fire on his shredded lips as they curled up in a cruel smile.

He watched Jack. A few people over the years had had the pleasure, or in his case horror, of seeing his tattered face and the reactions usually ranged between intense disgust and horrified screaming. The smile slipped a little when he watched Jack’s eyes widen in shock, then narrow in—anger?

No, rage. Jack was shaking. The muscles in his back were taught, his shoulders hunched up as though he were preparing for a fight.

“How long?” Jack hissed.

Gabriel’s eyebrows shot up, and he began to pull apart the stale bread to hide his surprise. “Sorry?”

“How long have you been like this?” Jack’s voice shook. It had an edge to it that made the monster in the pit of his stomach shift in its sleep. Gabriel soothed it back down and took a bite of the jerky to distract himself.

He didn’t have to answer this man. Didn’t owe him anything. But he was curious about how this was playing out. “Ten years,” he muttered around the jerky. He wagered that watching him eat was probably one of the less pleasant experiences one could have, but Jack didn’t take his eyes off his face.

“I’m going to fucking murder them.”

The intensity of the words made Gabriel pause in his chewing. He definitely was not just ‘no one’. “Please by all means, if you manage to find them, let me know.”

Jack’s face fell. “You don’t know? You don’t know who did this to you.”

Gabriel began to tear the bread into manageable chunks, pouring a tad of water on them to make them easier to chew. He barely tasted the meal, too caught up in Jack’s reaction. Not that it mattered. Now or ever, and this man needed to know that. “I don’t know who did this to me. And I don’t care if you think you should take up some kind of valiant quest to murder them on my behalf. I do not give two shits. You need to forget whoever I was to you before. Because he is dead.”

“He’s not though,” said Jack quietly. If Gabriel could put a word to how the words came out, he would say anguished was appropriate. “You’re sitting there, right in front of me.”

“I am not the same person. I don’t even have his face anymore.” Gabriel tried and failed to keep the bitterness from his words.

Jack finally looked away.

Gabriel looked down at his stale bread pieces, appetite suddenly gone. He flared his nostrils and began to flick the bits into the fire, watching it hiss and spit as the damp bread hit the coals. “You should leave.”

Jack looked up at him. “Do you want me to?”

Gabriel didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

Jack stood up abruptly. “I apologise for intruding,” he didn’t look at Gabriel as he said the words. Instead he began to back away, out of the firelight and into the shadows. “You won’t see me again.”

There was a pause, a moment left open for Gabriel to say something, anything. But he didn’t. He didn’t care about this stranger, and this stranger should certainly stop caring for him.

The moment passed.

“Goodbye Gabe.”

The words were whispered, soft, and they made Gabriel jerk his head around and half-rise out of his seat—a deep, unsettling sensation of déjà vu passing over him.

But Jack was gone.

Gabriel picked up his tea and stared into its depths. It drew him down—the dark, the pain, the sound of the drops of his blood on the cobblestones, the constant choir of screams worming their way up from the tortured depths of the dungeon he had awoken in. And cutting through it all was a name. A single name. The only memory in a blank mind, filling its corners with the possibility of it. It was whispered with tenderness, and it told him who he was.

Gabriel ground his teeth. But he still had no idea. He was just a walking corpse. A puppet for what lay inside—

Gabriel threw his tea into the fire, the coals hissing in protest before dying, plunging the clearing into darkness. He tore off his gloves, feeling his hands curl into claws, feeling his anger.

The beast inside opened a lazy eye.

And Gabriel snuffed out his anger like a candle. He shook out his greatcoat and rolled himself in it, shutting his eyes against the watchful moon, willing his mind to be silent. Willing the dark tide back, but feeling the memory of that first breath he took all those years ago come back to him.

His name echoed around the clearing. Wove its way into the threads of his being. Tore him apart and put him back together again. It was the only constant. The only truth. And those words were spoken in a quiet voice. Whispered with a tenderness Gabriel had not ever heard again in the ten years he had been living.

Until this moment.

Above the clearing, clinging to the crown of a tall pine, an ice-white owl watched the man with the scars put out his fire. It tilted its head ever-so-slightly at the way the man’s hands curled and hardened then fell apart into ash again.

It watched as the man fell into a fitful sleep.

And its heart broke when he woke again in the middle of the night screaming and reaching his clawed hand towards the sky.

The owl watched as the man did not go back to sleep, just stared at his ever-changing hands in the fading moonlight.

And as the moon finally set and the creeping touch of dawn began in the sky, the owl turned its head towards the North and leapt off its branch to ride the chill wind.

Chapter Text

 Gabriel stared up past his undulating hands—claw, hand, fingers: five, four, three, two, one. Smoke, hand, claw—at the disappearing stars. Dawn was still an hour or two off but there would be no more sleep for him tonight. His head was crowded with thoughts and questions that shouldn’t be answered; that needn’t be answered. Ever.

But he still asked them.

Through his tumbling thoughts wove a pair of blue eyes, warm as the sky he reached towards at the end of each night. Eyes that belonged to a man that had decided to rudely introduce himself back into Gabriel’s life and had got himself pushed back out as unceremoniously.

He dropped his hand down onto his face and rubbed his tired eyes. At the very least he should arrive in Tamor by the afternoon. A warm bath and a proper bed would be a nice change of pace before he had to find himself some work.

A flash of white, in the treetops high above his camp.

He catches the movement from the corner of his eye. The silent, white wings of an owl, beating once before it caught the Northern wind and was gone from sight.

Gabriel narrowed his eyes as he stared at the empty tree tops.

A gust of wind funnelled into the clearing as he sighed and sat up. It carried ice on its breath and he shivered, hastily tugging his coat on. Shaking out his long scarf, Gabriel stares down at it for a moment, both hating himself and the world for needing to wear it. He brushed over a tear in the fabric and grimaced, retrieving his sewing kit from his travel bags and setting about repairing it in the last of the pre-dawn light.

When the sun finally did show up, it bathed a dew-frosted forest in its golden light. Gabriel looked up at it sceptically as he pulled himself into Midnight’s saddle. Probably not a good sign for the weather ahead. At least the sky will be blue today, a tiny voice in the back of his mind piped up and was promptly strangled for bothering.

Without any other surprise meetings on the road, nor any more sightings of the owl, he made good time, arriving at Tamor in the mid-afternoon. A biting wind blew over the crossroads town on the edge of the Northern border, bringing with it the promise of winter and early snows. To the west lay the ocean, and the promise of a contract headed towards the shipping port. But he dreaded having to winter in a town that stunk of fish. The only other option once he was there was boarding a ship to the North or South and that was out of the question. West of Tamor lay the wilds, and eventually the desert, Gateway to the East. A crossing was easier in the winter, but not something he particularly fancied since he would still have to wear a coat and a scarf for three months. Besides, nothing particularly interesting was happening in the East.

So, it was to the north he would go.

Way in the distance lay the mountains that formed the border to the Northern Kingdom. It was mostly just sheep grazing land from Tamor to the foothills, then lawless bandit country on through the passes. They used to be garrisoned by Gibraltar’s forces, but things seemed to be on the decline for the North Kingdom. The last decade had not been kind to it.

Gabriel figured that he should have no problem picking up some mercenary work here, the town was bustling with merchants and farmers, all trying to sell something before the winter set in.

He dismounted Midnight and walked her through the Southern gate, eyeing the guards on the battlements of the town wall. They didn’t seem to care about a hooded stranger and waved him in with the rest of the crowd of farmers and sellswords. Once he was in the safety of Tamor’s walls, he made a beeline for the cheapest-looking part of town in the hope that he would be able to stretch his budget. Once he was there however, he took two steps into the first bar and turned right back around again, checking himself for lice that had surely infected him for merely setting foot over the threshold. He tried a couple more and concluded that even though funds were low, he still had standards.

He sighed and resigned himself to the streets a little closer to the centre of town. A cosy, yet busy tavern named The Honeyed Tongue was where he finally managed to get a small room and meal for a reasonable price. After stabling Midnight, he called for a bath the barkeep downstairs barking at her children to fetch some hot water.

When it was ready, he sunk into the hot water with a deep sigh. The relief was short-lived thought, and he hissed in pain when his left leg decided that it didn’t like the water and disintegrated into ash. That hurt. But it had happened before, and Gabriel steeled his mind and willed himself back together again, drawing on what lay beneath the surface.

The beast in the pit of his stomach raised its sleepy head—

And he soothed it back to sleep with little panicked gasps, drawing his newly formed leg up to himself and wrapping his arms tight around it, afraid the beast might hear the thumping of his heart. Not here. Please not here, he thought.

Hold yourself together, man. Gabriel almost laughed.

But he settled again. After that, he washed himself quickly, grimacing at the scars this body came with, and the aches and pains of his ever-shifting skin, mottled brown with death and fire.

An inheritance he had never asked for.

He dressed slowly, in a clean shirt and pants, pausing as his hands ran up against the massive scar that split his chest in two. Right down the middle, sternum to stomach it stretched and pulled, lighter than the rest of his skin. Unsurvivable, a wound like that.

Yet here he was.

He didn’t dwell on it. After pulling on his coat and boots and wrapping the scarf across his face, Gabriel trudged downstairs. The barkeep gave him directions to the merchant guild in town and the popular mercenary tavern. She said he should be able to pick up work, “strong lads like you, always in demand.”

The merchant guild yielded little. There were a couple of small farming caravans going south, but they either didn’t pay enough or didn’t need the kind protection he offered in the first place.

The tavern was similarly unhelpful, but Gabriel decided that he may as well stick around for a couple of hours, just in case. After brooding at one of the corner tables—hood up, eyes down, ears perked—for half an hour, a boisterous couple of mercs enter the bar.

“—you don’t know that. Me, I’d rather not make this journey my last, thank you very much. The money is good but I ain’t suicidal. Three ales, the strong stuff,” the voice called out. Gabriel peeked up at the woman shouting. The accent tickled something in the back of his mind, but he doubted it was his own memory. In any case, she didn’t look like anyone he had seen before. Short and stocky, she wore hard leather armour, had a short sword strapped to her side, and a shield on her back. Flanking her were two other similarly dressed mercs, both long and lanky and sporting the same bushy moustaches. They looked like brothers, maybe even twins.

The group took one of the empty tables close by to him. One of the Moustache Twins took out a set of cards from his pocket and began to deal, muttering to his companions about the onset of winter. After two rounds, Gabriel decided to get up, walking over to their table. He easily towered over all three of them and decided he probably cut a rather menacing figure.

The woman was not fazed in the slightest. She squinted up at him, “you mind?”

Gabriel shrugged, “mind dealing me in?”

“Mind giving me your name, Stranger?”

He paused, perhaps a second too long, before saying, “Gabriel.”

The woman’s eyebrow raised a touch, then she patted the empty seat beside herself, “alright then, Gabriel. I’m Char, that’s Seb and Will.” Char pointed to the two moustached twins in quick succession and he promptly forgot which one was which the second he took his eyes off them. “Gotta warn you, Will doesn’t play nice and I play dirty.”

Gabriel’s lips quirked up a little from underneath the scarf. “And Seb?”

“Oh, Seb’s the worst gambler on the planet.” She waved his concerns away and grinned wolfishly. “What about you?”

Gabriel shrugged, counting out a couple of his final coins. “I seem to do ok. Someone taught me the ropes a long time ago.”

Three rounds later and Gabriel had a sizable coin pile in front of him, wondering if he could simply gamble his way to prosperity. It was a strange thing, to rely on the shadow of a memory to guide his body and mind. He knew how to gamble, he just didn’t know how he knew. It was the same way he knew how to ride a horse, swing a sword (not that he needed that skill anymore), could speak three of the less common languages on the Continent, and was exceptionally good at hand-to-hand combat. There were numerous other skills he had discovered that his body knew how to do, yet his mind did not remember learning. It often dragged Gabriel back into the temptation of wondering who he had been before.

Apparently, a man who had known a strange blonde noble named Jack.

Had they been good friends, or something more? Gabriel had a preference for men (not that he had been able to do anything about it, being the monster he was), and he wasn’t going to deny that Jack was handsome—albeit young—but had the past Gabriel also had the same attraction? It wasn’t as if anything could even happen without the… what was inside… destroying anything he tried feeling any kind of intimacy tow—

“Check,” one of the Moustache Twins muttered, “cut and dry.” He threw down his cards as his moustache twitched up in a satisfied smirk.

Shit. That’s what dwelling on the past got him. Gabriel sighed and lay his own cards on the table, unable to match the hand. He pushed his coins towards the Moustache Twin with a begrudging nod.

Char gave her own cards a disgusted look as she tossed them onto the table. “You drift off there for a second, stranger?” she directed the question at Gabriel. “Something on your mind?”

Definitely not a pretty blonde. Instead, he sighs. “Work. Haven’t had any luck finding something that’ll pay well.” He looked mournfully at the last of his coins, now being pocketed in the Moustache Twin’s coin purse.

Char raised an eyebrow. “We’re in the same sinking ship then. There should be far more caravans passing through Tamor to the South this time of year. And there’s barely anyone going North this winter neither. Not that you’d want to. But…” she trailed off, tapping a finger on her mug of ale while staring into the contents.

“But?” Gabriel prompted.

Char looked towards her two companions, both of who shrugged, so she leaned forward, dropping her voice to a whisper. “Ever since the King has… been as he has, trade to and from Gibraltar’s been difficult to say the least. Lot of the merchant caravans are refusing to brave the mountain passes, this is before the snow sets in too, even with the knowledge they’ll get record prices for their goods once they get to Gibraltar. Most farmers are too poor to pay for protection, or just don’t have a harvest worth taking North. It’s been the third or fourth year in a row the yield has gone bad. What makes it doubly strange is that there’s nothing much coming down from the North either. Trade is strangled. Gonna be a hard winter for everyone.”

She shakes her head. “If you ask me, things ain’t been the same ever since the Knights were disbanded. The Northern King’s army is full of thugs and thieves, and he acts as if he ain’t concerned about that fact. Probably cause he ain’t got cause to be.” She spits on the floor, mouth twisted. “If Talon aren’t careful though, what’s left of the city will starve by the end of winter.”

Gabriel scoffs. Talon rumours had been flying across the lands for years now. A decade to be sure. But they were just rumours. Tales of the Vampire, the Witch, and their dreadful servants that sow the seeds of chaos and darkness. Tales told in the wee hours of the night, designed to frighten children into coming home and obeying their parents. “You’re telling me that Talon control the city? You know they’re just a rumour, right?”

“Rumours are always based in truth. Laugh all ya want Stranger, but you won’t catch me goin’ anywhere near that place again. We just came from Gibraltar and you’d have to pay me triple my normal rate to convince me that a trip back to that cesspool is worth it. Even then, I’d still probably say no.”

“That bad, huh?” Gabriel’s eyebrows knit together, still sceptical. Rumours had been flying about the Northern Kingdom for years and years, why should there be any foundation to them now?

“Aye, it’s that bad. Gibraltar used to be the shining city of the North, now it’s full of beggars and rats. People starving in the streets, being taken away, kidnapped. Necromancers and alchemists using dark and illegal magic on helpless victims. And the King does nothing.” Char shakes her head, eyes deadly serious. “Better off dead than going to that place.”

Gabriel sat back in his seat, crossing his arms. “So, say that Talon is real. Why would they make a move now, why not just stay in the shadows?”

“They are the shadows.” She gulps that last of her ale and then looks in disgust at her empty cup. “The Knights used to keep the Continent in check. Kept the rulers ruling and justice just. They weren’t perfect, but they were a whole lot better than nothin’. With them gone, Talon was able to move into the open. There ain’t no shortage of low lives who were willing to cause violence for a pretty penny.”

“Like you or me, for example?” Gabriel deadpans.

“Don’t get all high and mighty on me, Stranger. I know I sound like a hypocrite and I ain’t about to paint myself as a natural do-gooder, but I also ain’t about to sell myself to a side that considers human experimentation with dark magic to be a perfectly amicable past time. I’m a sell sword that protects caravans and farmers. I ain’t gonna fight in no war.”

Fair point. “Right. Apologies.” Then he blinks. “War? What war?”

“Well, here’s where I get to the speculation. I ain’t sure of it, and for now it’s just a feelin’, but I’m sure there’s something brewing.” Char looks around the quiet taproom, then leans closer, her voice lowering even more. “I only know this because… well, we were hired by a lesser noble visiting the castle. He was trying to petition the king for lower tariffs and for an apparently compulsory draft to take fewer of his able-bodied soldiers. And that’s not all. Because there, in the castle grounds, I saw… well I saw her.” Char shuddered.

“Her?” Gabriel frowned, leaning in closer despite himself.

“The Widowmaker,” Char hissed. “The vampire.”

Gabriel snorted, a well-meaning smile showing up beneath his scarf. “Now, I know for a fact that she’s definitely just a fairytale. Vampires don’t exist.”

But monsters like you do? the voice in the back of his head chimed in.

He ignored it.

Char narrowed her eyes and leaned in again. “She’s no fairytale. She’s real, and vicious. The King’s puppet master.”

Gabriel tried to resist rolling his eyes when a thought struck him. “Why are you telling me all this anyway?”

That caught Char off-guard, “uh… well, I’m not exactly a Talon sympathiser.”

“Oh?” Gabriel raised his eyebrows higher.

She saw the look and narrowed her eyes. “Look, I’m deciding to err on the side of moral good for once.” She let out a breath and scratched her nose, looking at him out of the corner of her eye. “Besides, you look like someone who might be able to help.”

Gabriel inhaled sharply, almost choking on his own breath. He looked like someone who might be able to help? Did she have eyes? Had his mottled, scarred skin somehow miraculously repaired itself? Did he not wear a hooded black coat that gave off a don’t-talk-to-me-ever vibe?

As far as stereotypes for the ‘side of moral good’ went, Gabriel was pretty sure his image emphatically occupied the other end of the spectrum.

For all she knew, he could be a Talon sympathiser.

Char must have seen his incredulous look because she had the sense to look embarrassed. “If you’re not, it’s none of my business, but you were mighty curious about the situation. Besides, I think you ain’t as scary as you want to seem.”

Well, she had him there. It wasn’t as if he wanted to appear like this. More like, he’d been shoehorned into the role for the last ten years and had got to a point where he’d decided to embrace it.

He sighs. “I just want to know whether there is any work going. I don’t give two shits about the political situation of the city. The Northerners can do what they want.”

Char’s eyes hardened. “Tch. Then I wish you all the best with your travels, Stranger.” She signalled to the bartender for another drink.

“If you want work,” one of the Moustache Twins spoke up, “there’s a caravan heading out tomorrow. Rush job through the mountain pass before the snows set in. Char won’t take the job because it’s headed to Gibraltar, but last we knew the merchant was still on the lookout for hired muscle.”

“I ain’t got no business returning to that place,” Char said with a grimace. “You’re more than welcome to take our place.” There was a pause while she studied him. “What kind of merc are you anyway? You ain’t got any weapons on you. You a sorcerer?”

Gabriel laughed. That’s what he sold himself as, but he didn’t have a drop of magic in him.

He did however, have something else. He slowly got up from the table, glancing down at his gloved hands, shifting skin beneath the leather. Broken lips stretched across his face in a parody of a smile as he flicked his eyes back up at Char.

“Something like that.” He gave them a lazy wave and began to walk away. “Thanks for the game and company. Hopefully it’s as good on the road to Gibraltar.”

Chapter Text

The merchant was an asshole. But he was a rich asshole. And the only time Gabriel was willing to tolerate rich assholes was when they paid him to.

The crew of hired muscle and the merchant’s own staff were gathered around three wagons, covered with heavy-duty canvas and locked tight, their contents hidden from sight. Whatever was in them must be valuable because the merchant was paying a lot of gold to get them from here to Gibraltar safely.

Besides himself, there were four other mercenaries—the normal sort—standing around. They had winter furs over their leather armour, clinched tight with various weapon belts. The two women were smoking and rubbing their hands together in the pre-dawn fog, trying to spark some warmth in the frigid autumn air. Out of the other two, one man was almost as tall as Gabriel but had a far broader chest and a bushy red beard. The great axe strapped to his back was patterned in the Northern traditions and glinted dully in the grey light. He was muttering at his companion, a wiry man half his width and height who looked like he wouldn’t hesitate to cut a person into ribbons with one of the several large knives he had strapped to the outside of his coat.

Gabriel was for once thankful for his scarf and hood. Pulled up in defence against the seeping cold, he sunk into the shadows of his cowl hoping he would be able to get away with a couple of weeks of minimal social interaction. He was the only merc with a horse, which meant he would either be scouting ahead or bringing up the rear of their little caravan.

“What are we waiting for?” one of the mercs growled. She poked her head out of the line to call out to the merchant’s personal staff. Her black hair was braided in rows close against her scalp and she had multiple piercings in her ears and eyebrows and a short sword strapped to her hip.

One of the drivers—an old man who looked like he’d spent his entire life scowling and wasn’t about to stop now—looked back at them, hands twitching at the reigns. “Lord Holwood hired two sorcerers,” the man shot Gabriel a quick look before pressing his lips into a thin line. “Evidently one of them deigned to be on time.”

“And the other has arrived!” A deep voice with a rough edge piped up from behind the group of waiting mercs. “Apologies I’m late, got held up at the market square this…”

The voice trailed off as the waiting caravan of people all turned to face the new arrival—a tall, broad-shouldered man in an impractically large feathered hat and expensive-looking white fur coat. The hood of the coat was down but he had an enormous scarf wrapped around his entire face, covering everything except a pair of blue eyes.

Jack’s hand, raised in greeting, wilted down to his side the longer everyone stared at him.

Leather creaked as Gabriel clenched his fists around Midnight’s reigns. Unbelievable.

Well, that was that. He turned to Lord Holwood and announced, “I’m out. Thank you for the offer of the contract, Lord Holwood, but I must regretfully decline the journey now that I’ve seen the other company you plan to keep.”

Lord Holwood, his own wide face semi-obscured by his hood, blustered. “What? You can’t do th—

“Wait, wait, wait,” Jack shouted just as Gabriel began to lead Midnight away, her hooves clattering loudly on the cobblestones.

Against his better judgement, Gabriel paused, head tilted to let Jack know he was listening.

“I swear this is a coincidence,” said Jack. “I didn’t know you were here, nor that you were taking this contract, or I wouldn’t have taken it.” He lowered his voice then and whispered, “But also, it’s really well-paying. And I need the cash.”

Gabriel breathed in deep through his nose. He had a bad feeling about all this. About Jack especially. He didn’t want to know who he used to be. He didn’t want to be tempted to know.

But he turned back around and narrowed his eyes at Jack. Again, he had no bag, no supplies, no horse. Just the clothes on his back. And all over his body. There was barely an inch of skin visible in the pre-dawn light. “What are you even hired for? You don’t have any weapons,” Gabriel said suspiciously.

Jack spread his arms wide, non-threatening, “I’m a sorcerer. One of the best in the land at your service.” Jack kept his eyes piercing Gabriel, daring him to say otherwise.

Gabriel opened his mouth, ruined lips stretching, ready to—

But the moment passed.

Gabriel sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Stay away from me,” he muttered in Jack’s general direction. Then he pulled himself into Midnight’s saddle and rode up the line, taking point.

Besides, Jack did have a point; the job was really well-paid. And who was Gabriel to deny a man his gold?

Lord Holwood narrowed his eyes at Gabriel as he passed. “Well,” he sneered, “if my hired help is done getting to know each other, you can all get on with doing your jobs. Move!”

Gabriel ground his jagged teeth as they rode out of the town gates and turned to the North. He didn’t look behind him once.

Jack trudged along at the back of the caravan, slowly digging a salt mine in the back of his head. The guilt was there too, waiting quietly in the corners, telling him that this was a terrible idea. Run. Run away, it whispered.

You should die for what you did to him.

I did, was always his worthless reply. But that just made the gnawing guilt worse. He would never atone for what he had done to Gabe. Never.

And yet here was a chance. A chance, not for forgiveness, there would never be forgiveness, but perhaps for another beginning.

Selfish, that voice whispered at him.

I know. I know, he howled back at it.

It felt like he was at war with himself. He had no right to try and know this man with Gabriel’s face, because he wasn’t Gabe. But at the same time, he so very much was Gabe. In the way he talked and moved and hunched his shoulders and flicked his hood up when he was pissed off.

He was achingly Gabe.

It made Jack yearn to fill the void that had marked the grief he had carried for the last ten years. But while there was still grief, grief for a man who was lost to him forever, Jack couldn’t help but feel a glimmer of hope.

Because Gabe was alive.

The self-loathing raised its weary head, stealing Jack’s breath and making him hunch over. It kept him there like that for a time, and it was all Jack could do to stop himself from just disappearing again. He needs to respect Gabe-Gabriel’s wish to stay away from him. He needs to get a handle on himself and understand that Gabriel neither knows him nor wants to know him.

Completely understandable.

Besides, it’s not like his Gabe would want anything to do with him in any case.

Jack sighed heavily and shoved his hands in his pockets, retreating into the shadow of his hat. No. He’d spent the last ten years trying to atone for the unatonable. The worst of it was the realisation that the only thing that was keeping him near this Gabriel was the fact that he wasn’t Gabe.

Coward, the monster chewing on his insides whispered softly. Coward.

He despised himself.

But gods above, was there no way out of that. He’d tried, more times than he could count.

Jack poked his head out from behind the rear cart. The pairs of mercs were each walking on either side of the caravan, while Gabriel was scouting ahead, a tiny black speck in the distance, almost lost to the rolling fields of harvested wheat. Thankfully the sky had remained cloudy, washing the world in grey and allowing Jack to pull down the scarf he had wrapped around the lower half of his face. It made him grimace a little at the thought that he and Gabriel matched, except he had managed to end up looking perpetually like he’d never left his late twenties, while Gabriel… He felt the familiar rumble of fury, but it was miniscule compared to the crushing wave of guilt that ate at his heart.  

He flicked his keen eyes out over the countryside to distract himself. The colours of the fields were dulled to the pale greys and yellows of dying weeds and grass in the face of the coming winter. Way in the distance the mountains that formed the border between the middle Kingdoms and the North loomed, caps already dusted with mild autumn snow. The passes were dangerous most times of the year, but since this was one of the final caravans of the harvest to leave before the winter snows, it was probably in for an attempted robbery or two. It did make Jack somewhat suspicious of what Lord Holwood—he struggled not to roll his eyes at the self-imposed title the upmarket merchant had taken—was transporting if he had enough gold to hire two sorcerers.

Or, more like two idiots posing as sorcerers.

Jack didn’t know exactly what Gabriel was playing at, but since neither of them were magic at all, it would be mighty interesting to see what they would do should any bandits be stupid enough to attempt an attack. Jack sincerely hoped he didn’t have to find out, because (at least for him) it would probably end up being very messy.

For now, he trudged alone with his thoughts at the back of the carts; the least desirable place to be after a line of horses.

The sun didn’t show its sorry face all day and for that Jack was thankful. As the light faded, Lord Holwood called a stop to the caravan and they pitched camp in an empty field. Jack was thankful he was on the higher paygrade as he and Gabriel (from opposite sides of the camp) watched the servants do all the work. He glanced up at Gabriel for a second, only to find the other man staring back at him from under the shadow of his hood. He cut a menacing figure—with his massive arms crossed and long black cloak with its furred collar wrapped tight—but Jack’s keen eyes caught his look of intense inquisitiveness, as if Jack was some puzzle laid out for Gabriel to solve. Jack raised his eyebrows and then tried to ignore his bitter, selfish disappointment when Gabriel frowned and turned away.

The camp was decisively split into two. Around one fire sat Holwood, his wife (a shrewd-looking woman who seemed to perpetually look like she regretted every single life decision that had led her to this point), and his trusted staff. The mercs were pointed away to the other, smaller, fire.

Gabriel sat just behind that, in the shadows.

Jack hesitated for just a moment before sitting himself in front of the fire—as far from Gabriel as possible, but with a line of sight on him anyway.

The tall woman with the braided hair turned her scrutinizing gaze to him as he sat down. He took off his hat and unwound the scarf from his face. She appeared to relax when he turned out to be relatively normal-looking. “Nasty scar you got there, sorcerer.”

Jack finished unwinding his scarf before he looked at her, eyebrows raised just daring her to ask.

“So how did you get it?” she said with a flash of white teeth. Her companion rolled her eyes, seemingly used to the woman’s bluntness. The two other mercs had paused in their quiet conversation to stare at him.

Outside the light of the fire, Jack saw a hood tilt ever so slightly to one side.

He gave an easy smile to the group and shrugged, “I had an unfortunate trip.”

“A trip? Where did you go to end up looking like you had a battle axe smash your face in?”

“Tripped into the path of a battle axe being swung at my face,” Jack said matter-of-factly.

The merc barked a laugh. “I bet that’s a tale and a half. I’m Jade by the way. Lidia is my partner,” she said, gesturing at the quiet woman sitting beside her. Then she motioned to the bearded man and the skinny merc, “that’s Rake and Daden.”

“Jack,” he said with a grin. Before he could say anything else, they were interrupted with food being brought around. Jack politely declined, saying he wasn’t hungry, after which Jade interrupted and said he was hungry and promptly invited herself to accept his meal as well.

“You can’t just go around refusing good food,” Jade said around a mouthful of his stew. Daden was looking mournfully at his empty bowl and shooting envious looks at Jade’s second one. “How can you walk all day and not even be hungry anyway?” she accented her words with the spoon.

Jack just gave a half-smile, “don’t have much of an appetite these days. I’m on a diet.”

Jade snorted, entirely unconvinced.

“What kind of sorcerer are you?” asked Daden, he had an Eastern Kingdom’s accent and he chewed each word thoroughly before spitting them out.

“The kind that doesn’t get hungry?” Jack spread his arms.

“Fuelled by magic?” Lidia asked quietly, her eyes narrowed.

“Something like that.”

“What kind of magic?” asked Rake, his deep voice rumbling out of his enormous chest.

Jack hesitated a moment but then said, “the kind that doesn’t lend itself to demonstrations in front of the fire, but is mighty handy in a bandit attack.”

“You’re not a necromancer, are you?” Jade clicked her teeth shut around the question, biting it off.

Jack leaned back in his seat, eyeing her. She would be one to watch out for. “I kill people with the goal in mind that they stay dead. I have no wish for them to come back again.” All true. But at the same time terribly hypocritical.

“That we can agree on,” Jade grinned, showing off her teeth.

His answer seemed to satisfy all of them and eventually the conversation turned to the lack of work at the moment and then to previous jobs they had worked. Jack chimed into the conversation when it lulled, and steered it gently away from anymore probing questions about his past. Mostly though, he watched Gabriel.

When the time came to draw straws for the night watch, he found himself unwittingly paired with Gabriel despite his quiet protest. Lidia and Jade looked at him, unimpressed. “You know him, so you get paired with him,” Jade said.

“But don’t you want to have a sorcerer around during your watch?” Jack tried.

The two women looked at each other and shrugged. “Nah, not really,” said Jade.

Jack looked at the men. Rake put up his hands in a gesture that said, ‘don’t ask me,’ and Daden just shrugged.

Fine then. But Gabriel had to know this wasn’t Jack’s fault.

Jack heard a growl from outside the firelight and he sighed.

Lidia leaned in close to him, “what kind of sorcerer is he?” She flicked her eyes over to Gabriel’s back.

Jack shrugged, “why don’t you ask him?”

“I get the vibe that he doesn’t much like people asking questions,” Lidia gave a wry smile. “Understandable, of course… Well, you two have the last watch. Daden and Rake will wake you for it.”

Jack nodded, trying not to sigh at the thought of having to go through the charade of sleep. Every time he did, he was reminded that he wasn’t quite human anymore. And he would remember just how far he had fallen.

Which was nowhere near what had been taken from Gabe, he reminded himself with a stab of guilt to his stomach so painful he was afraid his guts might spill onto the ground. Instead, he swallowed it down and made a show of rolling himself in the bedroll he had been given for the journey. The stars were covered by clouds that carried the threat of rain—which would make for a pretty dull next six hours—but at least they promised a warmer day tomorrow. Jack hoped they would persist, he hated having to watch which way his head turned so he wouldn’t accidentally get an eyeful of sunlight.

He sighed out air he no longer needed to live. His eyes refused to close and he settled in for a night of staring at the canvas of dark clouds.

Soon enough that got mighty boring and he flicked his gaze over in the direction of where Gabriel was sleeping. Again, he had made his bed as far away from everyone as he could get without it becoming detrimental to the party’s safety. The man lay curled on his side with his back to the camp. Every so often he would twitch in his sleep.

The hours rolled on by without anything of interest happening. Jade and Lidia shook awake the other pair for their watch and then lay next to each other. Rake raised his eyes at Jack when he saw Jack watching.

“Can’t sleep?” he rumbled quietly. It was like listening to a thunderstorm trying to whisper.

“I sleep with my eyes open,” Jack whispered back.

Rake laughed quietly at that and moved to take his watch position. Daden followed him with silent footsteps.

The hours slowly inched forward. Staring at night sky clouds for six straight hours did nothing to alleviate Jack’s gnawing guilt and by the time he heard the two men get up from their watch and come over to wake him, he was ready to leap out of bed. They seemed surprised at his display of vigorous energy so early in the morning, but Jack avoided their questioning looks by whispering that he would take care of waking up Gabriel. Rake nodded appreciatively and yawned, rolled himself in his blanket, and began to snore before Jack had taken two steps.

A sudden nervousness weighed down his silent steps as he approached Gabriel.

Gabriel was muttering in his sleep. He had left his gloves on but his fingers twitched constantly. Suddenly, just as Jack leaned down to shake him awake, Gabriel’s hand shot out, clutching, almost clawing at the sky above as he bolted upright with a gasp.

Jack’s hand was an inch from his shoulder and Gabriel stared at him—into him is what it felt like—as though Gabriel could read the shame in his soul. Then Gabriel’s eyes widened and he scrambled backwards from Jack’s hand.

“Get away from me!” he hissed, whisper ragged from beneath the scarf.

Jack felt like he had been punched. But he swallowed as he realised it wasn’t hate that laced the words and filled Gabriel’s eyes, but fear. Jack didn’t have enough time to ponder what it meant as Gabriel quickly got himself under control and his eyes hardened once again.

Jack put his hands up in a non-threatening gesture as he slowly stood up. “Just waking you for our watch.”

Gabriel stared at him for a few moments before he pulled himself up, adjusted his scarf and flipped up his hood.

Once his face was hidden in shadows that Jack could easily see through he said, “Fine. I’ll take north, you take south. Whistle if you see something.” And he stalked off, back straight and shoulders rigid.

Jack rubbed his eyes and turned the opposite direction. This was going to be a long journey. 

Chapter Text

The following day stayed cloudy, for which Jack was eternally grateful. He ended up at the back of the caravan again, but this time the other mercs would sometimes drop back to chat with him. Jade stayed curious about him and he had to tread carefully with his answers, but all in all, he thought it was rather sweet of them. It had been a while since Jack he felt the need to take a merc job, and he had to say, this one was already off to a much better start than the last.

Going to back to Gibraltar though...that wasn’t something he had ever entertained in the last decade.

Even now, something inside him told him to turn back. A little feeling burrowing down into the back of his neck.  You do not belong there anymore, it seemed to say.

You failed.

You ran away, it hissed.

He would have listened to it had it not been for the fact that he was more intent on following the broad back of a certain dead man with a predisposition for dressing like a tall, dark stranger.

So he trudged onwards.

The mountains grew steadily closer, the tops dusted with the first snows of the year. Lord Holwood looked decidedly unimpressed at that and proceeded to complain loudly to his wife and anyone else who had a pair of ears for the next six hours. Jack tuned him out, looking forward to a dry room and bed tonight. They were stopping in the last town with a big enough inn to accommodate the caravan just before the crossroads to the West and North.

A ‘big enough’ inn turned out to be one in which Jack, Rake, Daden, and Gabriel had to share a room. Jade managed to wheedle a private room for herself and Lidia out of Holwood. Jack didn’t want to attempt that as it would require speaking to the man, so he made do with a reasonably comfortable bed in the crowded room.

He had to awkwardly accept a plate of gristly roast meat and shrivelled vegetables for supper in the inn’s common room, but just pushed the various bits of wrinkly carrot around the plate for ten minutes before giving it up to Jade, hoping that it looked like he’d eaten some of it. Jade was too hungry to care and started to shovel the second plate of food into her mouth, no questions asked.

He did however catch Daden watching him. The skinny man glanced away when Jack met his eyes. He’d best not push his luck. Getting too friendly could be a death—well, it was probably more likely to be a horrific exile involving fire and attempted killing—sentence if they ever found out what he was.

Gabriel had taken his food to the darkest corner of the room and managed to eat in the shadow of his hood without drawing any attention but Jack’s.

He found himself longing, more than anything right now, just to speak to him. Talk like they used to. He caught Gabriel’s eye for a second that turned into a moment too long and it just made the grief and shame bubble up and into his chest until he had to look away lest it overwhelmed him.

He rubbed his eyes and slumped over, tired all of a sudden. Gods, he would do anything to be able to sleep again.

“You alright, Jack?” asked Lidia. Her singsong voice concerned.

Jack looked up at the rest of the mercs. They’d cleared their plates and had just started to deal out cards. They were all staring at him in expectation.

And Jack suddenly didn’t want to be here anymore.

Not with people. Not close to them. He swallowed as, for the first time in a while, he felt the slow hunger gnaw at his belly.

Jack stood up. “I’m a little tired,” he muttered, then he was off. He weaved through the taproom, perhaps a little faster than was considered human, but human enough. He burst outside, the chill air hitting his icy skin. He felt nothing. His nails bit deep into his stony palms as he clenched his fists, but no blood welled up. No blood flowed from the cuts. And still he felt nothing.

A breeze had begun to blow from the North again, down off the mountains carrying frost on its tongue.

Jack ran. When he was alone, he leaped into the air, folding himself around it and into the other shape he had been cursed with ten years ago. Dark, twisted magic. His very being was wrong. Evil.

It was all he deserved.

The pale owl with striking ice-blue eyes rode the evening winter wind.

Gabriel watched the room from under his hood. He had practically inhaled his food, starving after the long march that day.

He sipped his ale as often as he could while he watched the other mercs—and Jack—finish their food. Well, the mercs anyway. Jack had simply pushed the food around his plate and feigned being full when asked about it. He had caught Jack’s looks in his direction every so often. He wasn’t sure what he saw in Jack’s eyes…pity? Rage? Shame?

Whatever it was, it annoyed him. Who was this poor noble with no coin nor belongings, to just shoulder his way into Gabriel’s life?

At least he’d taken his advice to stay away from him for the last two days.

He was just about to take a sip of his ale when he caught another of Jack’s looks.

This one was different. It was as though Jack’s eyes drew him in and the world dropped away leaving nothing but that endless blue. Sound deepened, slowing down like he’d been dunked underwater and it was all he could do to try and swim to the surface. All he could to try and rip himself away from drowning in that terrible stormy sea. And when he finally did, the sounds and smells and sight of the full taproom overwhelmed him for a moment. A wave crashing over him, reminding him that though it had felt like he had been caught in Jack’s gaze for a year, only a moment passed.

Jack suddenly slumped in his chair. Hunched over the table, hands scraping along its wooden surface. It was like watching a man shatter. A thousand pieces scattering even as Jack desperately looked as though he was trying to hold himself together. His composure gone, Jack rubbed his eyes, looking for all the world like the loneliest soul in the land.

Gabriel swallowed against the weight of witnessing those emotions. He breathed in deep and willed his frantic heart to still.

He watched as Jack got up, made some excuse for himself and then moved.

He was fast. Weaving in and out of tables and patrons, Jack as good as sprinted out of the busy inn. The door opened and shut and suddenly the taproom was Jackless.

Gabriel let out a breath he didn’t realise he had been holding in a great huff. What the hell was all that about?

The mercs began to talk again, looking just as nonplussed as Gabriel felt after the rapid departure of one of their company. The knife man, Daden, had brought out a deck of cards and was dealing out to the others. Gabriel rubbed his temples. He didn’t really want to socialise after that, but this might be his only shot for the next couple of days to not act like a total loner for the rest of the journey.

Because—despite what he was—he didn’t mind company once in a while; he just wasn’t overly fond of company that had known the previous owner of his body.

He heaved himself to his feet and shook back his hood, making sure his scarf was still tight around the lower half of his face. Then he picked up his ale and made his way over to the table, pausing at the bar to order a round. When he made it to the table, he stood behind Jack’s vacant chair.

All of the mercs turned as one to look up at him.

Thankfully, the barkeep chose that moment to arrive with the round of drinks. “Mind if I join you?” Gabriel asked the surprised faces.

The woman with the dark braids glanced at the other mercs before accepting her drink and leaning back in her chair. “Sure. You want to give us your name, since you’ve only just now decided to say hello.”

Gabriel bit back a scathing reply and said instead, “Gabriel. Apologies for appearing…distant. I meant no disrespect to you.”

“None taken,” she easily replied. The woman, who introduced herself as Jade, motioned to the chair and took a gulp of her ale. The others introduced themselves and promised to deal him in next round.

“So Mr Mystery Sorcerer, what’s the deal between you and Jack?” asked Jade.

The table was silent for a moment as the mercs all turned to Jade and gave her the really? Look.

“What?” Jade held out her hands and didn’t look one bit apologetic. “I can’t help my curious nature.”

Gabriel crossed his arms and sighed. Better to nip this in the bud now than let them get any false assumptions. “There is nothing between us. I don’t even know him.” There. That wasn’t exactly a lie.

Three of them snorted, and even Daden raised one of his delicate eyebrows.

Rake grinned at him and said in his deep Northern accent, “so the show you gave us at the start of the journey was nothing then?”

Jade caught on and grinned cruelly. “Yeah, don’t suppose the whole ‘now that I’ve seen the company you plan on keeping Lord Holwood, I quit’ thing was just for attention?”

Gabriel kept a straight face and peeked at his cards to try and distract himself from the onslaught of personal questions he had no idea how to answer. He may have slightly forgotten that he had caused a scene at the start of this whole ordeal and now regretted his choice of words. Hmm, good hand though. He placed one of his cards up for bets and set the others off for a round.

By the unimpressed looks he received from the rest of the table, he was pretty sure his smug grin extended to his eyes when he won the round and dealership passed to him.

“Ok, if you won’t tell us, can we guess what happened?” said Jade as he was in the middle of the second dealing.

Gabriel hung his head and sighed. Maybe they would come up with a good explanation for him, because he had nothing. “Sure,” he growled.

“Oooh ok. Right,” said Jade, thinking on it as the round started. She put one of her cards up for betting and then looked Gabriel straight in the eye and crowed triumphantly, “you were caught in a nefarious conspiracy in which you were betrayed by Kingdom and country and Jack was either the cause or caught in it too!”

Gabriel blinked. There was no way he was inventive enough to come up with a story for that. “No.”

At the same time Lidia sighed. “Real life isn’t a plot out of one of your adventure stories, Jade.”

The next few games continued while Jade’s explanations got more and more fantastical.

“He tricked you into going to the Fairy Realm?”

“No.”

“Mutinied and left you on an island to die?”

Gabriel didn’t mind the sound of that one, but it would be debunked the second anyone asked him a thing about sailing. So, “no,” he said.

“Traded your soul to a witch so that he would have eternal youth?”

Gabriel outright laughed. Jack did appear to be young, perhaps somewhere in his late-twenties, but somehow he had a feeling that Jack was older than he looked. It was a little uncanny so maybe the witch thing might have a shred of truth to it. But…

“Why is the witch in that scenario accepting other souls? Wouldn’t she need Jack’s?” he asked, playing a card he knew would win him the round.

The next minute was spent disputing the way witches soul contracts worked with Jade and Rake getting into a heated argument about the merits of selling your own soul versus betraying someone else.

Then Lidia clicked her fingers causing the table to go silent. “Oh,” she said. “I get it. You were ex-lovers.”

Gabriel, who had decided to choose this unfortunate moment to attempt to drink some of his ale surreptitiously, inhaled sharply and then doubled over choking.

Fuck.

That was the only thought going through his head as he coughed up his guts while holding the scarf over his mouth.

Fuck.

Dimly, he felt someone clapping him on the back, and voices asking if he was ok.

Fuuuuuuuuu—

Surely not. Please, he thought feebly as he slowly got himself under control again, if there were any gods out there, they were surely not this cruel.

If the gods existed though, they had already given him this shitty hand in life, so what was another dud card? He shouldn’t be surprised really.

But ex-lovers? No.

However, the thousand and one tiny looks Jack had thrown his way for the past two days seemed to say otherwise. Gabriel swallowed dryly as he remembered that smile Jack had given him back in the clearing, like Gabriel had just lit his entire world on fire and he had stared at it burning in wonder.

Shit.

Gabriel suddenly realised that all of the mercs were staring at him. Rake and Jade looked concerned, Lidia looked bewildered and Daden had his eyes lidden, expression neutral. “I…” Gabriel’s voice was a rasp. He cleared his throat and tried again. “We’re not ex anything. I just—he was a huge dick during sorcery training,” he invented on the spot.

“Was a huge dick or had a huge dick?” Jade gave him a shit-eating grin and attempted to elbow him, which he neatly dodged.

“Was a huge dick,” Gabriel said from between his teeth. He could feel his face heating up.

Goddamnit. His own attraction to Jack was just left over ghost feelings from the last owner of this body. They definitely weren’t his own. Nuh uh. No way. Stop thinking about that, he told himself desperately.

“Look, I’ll tell you this in confidence, but you better not tell another soul,” Gabriel hissed at them. They also better not ask another soul to back up his story, because it was one hundred percent a lie.

He stared at them all until they each nodded. “Ok. Well. He set me on fire with the worst aimed fireball I’ve ever seen anyone attempt to throw. Kid couldn’t aim for shit. And he never attempted elemental magic again after I was through with him.” There, that should stop any unnecessary lines of questioning into Jack’s non-existent magic ability.

The others seemed to buy it since Jade cackled and Rake boomed out a full-bellied laugh. Daden cracked a smile, picking up the card stack again and dealing him into the round. It was only Lydia, who chewed on her bottom lip looking sceptical that worried Gabriel, but she didn’t say anything further.

He sighed in relief as the game started again, even as his mind reeled.

What if they had just been really good friends? Ah, who was he kidding? If the attraction he currently felt towards Jack was any indicator of something left over from before, that pretty much doomed him. The two biggest moments of the last two days that stuck out to Gabriel as damning evidence was the complete and utter rage when Jack had seen his face, and the loss and hurt that had crumpled Jack when Gabriel had told him to leave.

Surely it was all just a big misunderstanding. Please be a big misunderstanding, he prayed to whatever gods were listening to his quiet existential drama.

And well… there was one way to find out what they had been to each other. But Gabriel was more than reluctant to take that path. After all, he’d been running from it for nearly a decade.

After that revelation he did atrociously during the next few rounds and bowed out shortly after, making some excuse about the early start tomorrow. Thankfully the mercs hadn’t asked him any more questions, turning to the tense political situation in the North and speculating what the city would be like once they got there. He had listened closely before it became apparent that the mercs knew less than Char had. After all, news from the North was as scarce as trade this year.

Lying in the comfortable bed of the shared barracks, Gabriel frowned up at the ceiling.

Ex-lovers? What did that even mean? Had they ended their relationship before he had awoken naked in a dungeon and as stripped of memories as a newborn babe?

There were only bits and pieces of those first few days. Jagged memories of light and sound. He remembers running, the sound of his own panicked breath beating in his ears. He remembers the hunger, the pain, the blood. Whose blood, he wasn’t sure. He remembers being cold and stumbling through a forest. Bare feet on the soft snow. And then—

Best not think about after…

A good chunk of at least a month was missing until he finally came to his senses, warm and cosy, in a cabin in the middle of…

Best not think about that either. But he had chosen to wonder the Southern Reaches and Middle Kingdoms ever since.

Maybe the previous version of himself had been presumed dead. The scars on his body certainly told that particular truth. Which meant…

Had Jack… had Jack been mourning a dead man for ten years?

That might just explain the look he had received tonight.

Shit.

And now, not for the first time, but certainly the first in a long long while, Gabriel felt the desire to know what had happened for him to end up like this. He put his gloved hand in front of his face, able to see it reasonably well in the dark room. He pulled down his scarf and ran the leather over his damaged lips, felt the sharpened teeth embedded in his mouth.

He hadn’t always been like this.

He had known that, but Jack’s look when he had first seen what had become of Gabriel’s face confirmed it. Such rage on his behalf.

So who had he been before? Who was the man who had inhabited this body, possibly loved a strange man with blue eyes, and then got himself in a situation where his body had been torn apart again and again. Who had he been before he woke up in the dark of that dungeon, with a hunger inside that had consumed all waking thought, and nightmares of reaching towards the blue sky before being dragged into the shadow?

Gabriel dropped the hand onto his face, feeling the ache, the hunger, the quiet predator that sat inside, calmly waiting.

He wasn’t sure when he had fallen asleep, but when he woke with a start, arm outstretched and reaching towards the sky that had haunted him for ten years, the others had returned. Gabriel took deep breaths, trying to get his terrified heart under control as he glanced around the room hoping he hadn’t woken anyone. Rake was snoring up a storm, while Daden slept as quietly as he moved when awake. Then Gabriel’s roaming eyes locked onto a pair of blue ones, bright and staring right at him out of the shadows.

Jack was sitting on his bed with his back against the wall and his arms around his legs, as if he were trying to hold himself together. The expression on his face told Gabriel that he wasn’t doing a very good job.

And Gabriel could do nothing but stare. Because Jack’s eyes were the same colour as his sky.

Gabriel squeezed shut his eyes and lay back on his bed, ignoring the other man. Trying to ignore him anyway.

Ex-lovers.

Gods above. What had he got himself into?

Chapter Text

Gabriel woke again with a start. Pre-dawn light filtered through the single window of the room, and the others were just stirring awake.

Then he froze in a brief moment of panic.

Where was the sky?

He always woke reaching for the sky.

Had he slept an entire day?

His brain kicked in—had he just had a nap? That couldn’t be right. Not once in ten years had he been able to sleep again after the dream.

But he had just woken up, so logically he had been asleep.

Strange…

Gabriel promptly shoved it out of his mind when he glanced over to Jack’s bed, finding it unsurprisingly empty. At this point he was sure Jack either slept very little or not at all. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes. He shouldn’t be thinking about him. Jack was a mystery, and one that would be dangerous to solve. One that might come with answers he doesn’t want to hear.

The other two mercs were groaning loudly as they pulled themselves out of bed. Daden clutched his head and was muttering in a language Gabriel could understand about every fifth word of. Unsurprisingly, he could pick out all the curse words.

He pulled on his coat, gathered his things and quietly made his way down to the common room. Jack was sitting at a table in the darkest corner of the room nursing a cup of something hot in his hands. He glanced up as Gabriel entered the room but dropped his eyes when he saw who it was. Gabriel ignored the slight stab of disappointment he felt at that.

The smell of coffee brew and fresh baked bread was wafting throughout the empty (except for Jack) room and Gabriel gratefully accepted a cup of coffee from the barkeep. He figured he had a few minutes to down his coffee before the others arrived and took a table two apart from Jack’s, promptly burninng his mouth on scalding hot black coffee.

Jack didn’t look at him. Jack didn’t drink whatever he was holding either.

Well, he was certainly in a dark mood. Which Gabriel was fine with. Well, he should have been fine with, but shit, that conversation from last night suddenly hit him like a fireball to the face and gods above, he was finding it difficult to swallow all of a sudden.

Gabriel almost let out a sigh of relief when the other mercs arrived downstairs, yawning and followed shortly afterwards by Holwood’s staff. Jade and Lidia looked exhausted and sat with their coffee and bread, munching on it quietly.

When Holwood’s staff moved outside to ready the caravan for departure Gabriel went with them. He wrapped up some bread from the barkeep for later when he could eat it on the road. By the time he had Midnight saddled and ready to go, the rest of the caravan was in motion preparing for the day ahead.

Gabriel waited at the front with a hand on Midnight’s neck and was whispering quiet reassurances to her when he heard the tinkle of glass breaking behind him followed by a muttered curse.

He turned around to see the driver of the front wagon begin to cough violently as a dark green smoke drifted up from a shattered glass vile that had fallen from under the cover of the wagon. The driver wheezed as he stumbled off the wagon, the corner of the tarp flipping up for a moment and giving Gabriel a brief flash of light bouncing off reflective surfaces within.

Then the driver keeled over and fell to the ground as the smoke dissipated just as quickly as it had appeared.

Gabriel ran over to the man and knelt down beside him. The others had heard the commotion and were running over as Gabriel yelled to find a healer and get Lord Holwood.

Then he rolled the driver over and froze. The man was gasping for breath and clutching his throat. Gabriel was about to reach for him when he saw the man’s eyes.

They were cast wide in panic and fear. And he was bleeding from them.

“What—

Gabriel began to say before Lord Holwood arrived and he had to jump out of the way or risk being mowed down by the large man. Then Holwood began to shout for one of his staff to find something from one of the other wagons while simultaneously yelling for everyone to give the sick driver some space.

Gabriel backed off, flicking his eyes around at the other mercs. Rake and Daden looked confused while Jade and Lidia were trying to edge closer to see what was happening without much luck. Jack was staring at the crowd surrounding the fallen driver, a deep crease between his keen eyes. He kept glancing back to the wagon and the place where the green smoke had dissipated into the air.

Then they slid over to land on Gabriel.

Gabriel raised an eyebrow at him and then looked pointedly at the wagon. Do you know what that was?

Jack raised his own eyebrows in surprise and then they dropped again as he nodded almost imperceptibly.

After that, things moved fast. Lord Holwood wouldn’t stop shouting, but soon enough the fallen driver was bundled into the back of one of the wagons with assurances that he just needed a rest. “Derek always did work hard!” Holwood shouted to anyone who would listen. One of his other staff took the driver’s place and soon the caravan was moving.

The driver didn’t make an appearance at lunch. The weather had been clear during the day, delighting Gabriel with weak autumn sunlight. He kept his hood down, enjoying the quiet warmth that soaked into his damaged skin. It didn’t go as deep as the constant ache of his bones, but Gabriel felt satisfied all the same. They steadily wove their way through the foothills of the mountains, the terrain moving from harvested fields to rocky sheep country.

When the caravan stopped for the night the driver was nowhere to be seen. There was a sober mood around the camp and none of the mercs felt like talking much. Gabriel feigned wanting to smoke during his dinner so he could eat it away from the group. No one tried to stop him but when he did eventually light up one of the little rolls of tobacco he had found he enjoyed occasionally, Jade and Lidia came over and stood beside him.

Jade looked at him expectantly with her unlit smoke. He held out his box of matches, which she took with a sceptical smirk.

“Thought you might light up with some kind of magic, sorcerer,” she said.

Gabriel leaned deeper into the shadow of his hood and took a drag of smoke, feeling it swirl around his lungs, calming him. “Not that kind of sorcerer,” he muttered.

Jade grunted and lit Lidia’s smoke for her. All three of them stood in silence for a moment.

 “You know what happened to that driver today?” asked Jade.

Gabriel shook his head and grimaced, hoping that was answer enough.

Jade looked away, out over the undulating hills, broken up with boulders poking out of the earth and the occasional tall thornbush. The moon was half full and rising in the east, casting enough light through the clear skies to see the rise and fall of the land.

“Do you know what cargo we’re escorting?” asked Lidia, her voice quiet.

Again, Gabriel shook his head. “Wasn’t in the contract. Wasn’t exactly a concern of mine until now.”

“Mmm,” was all Lidia offered in reply.

They smoked quietly for a few moments before Jade rudely tried to peer into the shadow of his hood. He sunk his face lower into his scarf and looked at her, unimpressed. “Do you mind?”

Jade stepped back, “you got something to hide? You’ve been bundled up since we first saw you.” And then she twitched to the side, receiving an elbow in the ribs from Lidia. “Ow!”

To Lidia’s credit she looked incredibly embarrassed by her partner’s nosiness.

Gabriel just sighed though. He didn’t particularly mind people asking, he just hated the reactions. He shrugged and muttered, “scars.”

Jade raised an eyebrow, “is that all? Why don’t you show ‘em off? Scars are dope as hell.”

“These aren’t the type of scars you show off.”

He thought she might let it lie, but apparently not! Jade opened her mouth just as Lidia hissed at her to shut up, but she bulled ahead regardless. “Nah, no scars are ever that bad. Here, want to see mine?”

Gabriel flicked away the butt of his smoke and shrugged. “Sure.”

Jade stepped back into the half-moonlight and hiked up her coat, then pulled up her undershirt, exposing her side, right up to her breast. Her skin looked like it had been shredded. The moonlight traced the pale lines of thick scars that streaked her dark skin. His eyebrows shot up, she would have had to have a skilled healer close by to have survived that. Lidia sighed into her hand as Gabriel said as much.

“Yep. If Lidia hadn’t dragged me off the field, the griffon would have ate my guts for dinner.”

“You’re a healer?” Gabriel looked at Lidia.

Lidia shrugged, “not a very good one, but yeah. The only thing my magic ever really let me do.”

“That’s a load of shit,” said Jade, hands on her hips. “I would’ve died without you.”

Gabriel felt his stomach drop a little, the darkness waiting there shifted. He swallowed, hoping that her magic wasn’t powerful enough to detect the complete lack of his. Then a thought struck him. “Wait, if you are a healer, did you look at the driver this morning?”

Lidia was already shaking her head, “Holwood wouldn’t let me near him. Which is why we wanted to ask you if you knew something.”

“Sorry to disappoint,” Gabriel muttered. This whole caravan was getting more and more suspicious. He cast his eye back to the campsite where Holwood’s staff were bedding down for the night—minus the injured driver.

Jade took a last drag of her smoke and then flicked the burning ember to the ground. “Well?” she looked at him expectantly.

“Well what?”

“I showed you mine. You show me yours.” She wiggled her eyebrows.

Gabriel sighed, resigned. He looked at her honestly, “you sure you won’t run away screaming?”

The look on Jade’s face said if you ever suggest I would run away again, I’ll cut you.

Gabriel shrugged and pulled down the scarf, giving them a smile.

Jade’s eyes widened and she let out a low whistle. “Damn. They’re nasty. How did you get ‘em?”

“Don’t know,” said Gabriel. He hadn’t exactly thought of an excuse for anyone that didn’t run away immediately. He decided the truth was probably ok.

“Really?” asked Lidia. She was frowning at them, concentrating, as if trying to remember something.

Gabriel shook his head and pulled the scarf back up. “No idea. Just woke up without a memory of how I got there and my face was…like this.”

Jade snorted and punched him in the arm. He looked from his arm to her, but she ignored him.

“Ah, you’ve still got a pretty good looking top half, and I wager your totally-not-ex back at the camp is pretty into it.” She threw her hand in the vague direction of the camp and grinned at him. “If there’s one demographic that digs scars more than women, it’s men.”

Gabriel’s smile slid from his face. Lidia seemed to gauge the souring mood that comment had dragged him into and suggested that perhaps it was time to turn in for the night.

When they got back to camp, Gabriel found himself and Jack nominated once again for last watch of the evening. Gabriel didn’t look at Jack, just went to lay down on his bedroll and tried to fall asleep, knowing what was to come.

Then he was reaching for the sky, about to be dragged under by the darkness that curled from the void beneath—but a light hand on his shoulder woke him before he was consumed by the dark.

The hand was snatched away quickly as Jack stood up, obviously not wanting a repeat of what happened last time. Gabriel looked around wildly before he managed to get his breathing under control. Everyone else in the camp was soundly asleep and, seeing that, he pulled down the scarf, breathing in the crisp night air, calming his rapidly beating heart.

He caught Jack’s look as he slowly sat up and then pulled his aching body up to stand.

He smiled cruelly, feeling the ruined skin stretch across those sharpened teeth. “Don’t like it?” he asked, staring Jack dead in the eye.

Jack’s nostrils flared, and there was that rage again. Not directed at him, but enough to make him sceptical of the survival rate for people that questioned Jack’s honour. In the end Jack didn’t take the bait, but nor did he look away, fixing Gabriel in his gaze and daring him to say more.

Gabriel suddenly regretted his words, but instead of taking them back he asked what had been on his mind since this morning. “Do you know what happened to that driver?”

He didn’t think it was possible but Jack’s expression darkened and he shook his head. “I have seen that green smoke before though. A long time ago.” He opened his mouth again but seemed to think better of it and fell silent.

“What is it? Alchemy?” Gabriel was sceptical of alchemists. They often promised gold but usually only ended up with pain and failed experiments. He was half convinced he was the living result of one.

Jack nodded. “Chemical and magic infusion. I don’t know the extent of what it does but the infusions were outlawed decades ago. The magic becomes tainted and dark. Necromantic and shapeshifting abilities can be heightened but there’s a price. And only powerful sorcerers are able to harness it.”

“You seem to know an awful lot about it,” Gabriel says quietly, suddenly on guard.

Jack narrowed his eyes. “I’ve been in my fair share of battles. If you really want to know how I know all this, you need only ask.”

Gabriel was silent. He knew all about tainted magic. Perhaps—

He cut off his own thoughts; dwelling on the past would do no good. “So you think we’re transporting illegal magic? Probably why Holwood was so eager to leave town and get over the mountains.” Actually, his generous sum of pay now made a lot more sense. And the fact they had four fighters and two ‘sorcerers’ guarding the caravan.

Jack paused, considering him, his head tilted to the side. Gabriel was suddenly struck by the image of an owl. There was a fierce intelligence in his eyes, a wisdom beyond his young years. “I think we should watch Lord Holwood and his staff closely,” he said.

Gabriel was about to turn away from him and take his watch when Jack spoke again, “it begs the question though, as to what we will do if it is illegal magic.”

He left the question open and Gabriel narrowed his eyes.

“First of all, there is no we. And second, I don’t particularly care. As long as I get paid and you stay the hell away from me afterwards, Lord Holwood can transport whatever he wants.”

He glanced back at Jack and saw the hurt cut across the other man’s face, followed by a bitter disappointment. And somehow, Gabriel could tell Jack was disappointed in him. Not in the Gabriel he used to know, but in him. Now. He didn’t have a chance to see anything else because Jack abruptly turned on his heel and swiftly walked away.

Gabriel felt bad. The curl of regret made him suck in his cheek and flare his nostrils. But it was too late to take back the harsh remark.

He kicked a rock as he made his way towards a rocky outcropping that would offer a good vantage point for his watch and seethed at the turmoil in his stomach. It wasn’t Jack’s fault Gabriel couldn’t remember a thing, but it also wasn’t an invitation into his life again. And it wasn’t an invitation to judge him by the standards of who he used to be.

He didn’t even know what kind of man he was.

Gabriel dragged a hand down his face. That’s when he felt them.

Tremors. They began from the pit of his stomach and moved under his skin, up his chest and then down his arms making him shiver violently. He hissed out a curse as he stumbled on the rocky ground and tried to concentrate on not letting any part of himself fall to ash.

This was just his kind of luck. He already felt bad, but you know what would feel worse? An attack, right now. Of course.

He’d had them before, when his entire body threatened to fall apart and the only thing that could put it back together was the monster that lived inside it.

No. Not this time.

Gabriel gritted his teeth and concentrated. He felt his body. Every piece, every inch, every bone. Could feel it. Most of it was in the throes of a deep, deep, pain—one that he ignored until he couldn’t anymore.

The hunger.

He felt it, sunk into it and held onto himself. He gave up on the rocky outcropping as he doubled over shivering. Arms wrapped around his stomach, he sunk to the ground, curling in on himself, trying to contain the tremors and the burning pain that came with them. The claws of a raging beast against the bars of its cage.

Well, at least it wasn’t one of his really bad attacks. Those could level entire vill—

He bit off that thought with a click of his teeth, shredding it and spitting it into the dark. It was no good to dwell on the past. Hold yourself together now, he thought.

Slowly. Slowly the tremors passed and Gabriel began to breathe again. Shaky breaths, uneven, terrified and disgusted, but breaths all the same. He deepened them. Control, that’s what this was about.

His body settled. The hunger quieted. The pain drew back into his bones and the ash fell back under his skin. He unclenched his fingers from his sides one by one and then leaned back against the rocks. Where he had ended up was not a very good vantage spot for a watch but Gabriel was too exhausted to move.

He tore off his gloves to stare at his hands. They were shaking, and free from their prison they began their endless cycle he had little control over—hand, claw, ash, five, four, three, two, one—

He clenched them together to hold them still, praying that one day this torment would be over.

Chapter Text

He had been ignored the entire day and it was beginning to grate on Gabriel’s nerves.

Three times.

Three times he’d tried to apologise to Jack but he hadn’t even managed to open his mouth before the puffed up noble walked off without even bothering to make an excuse.

Absolutely pathetic.

It didn’t help that the other mercs dropped back every so often to ask him whether they had had a fight. Rake even going so far as to try and offer him relationship advice (“just apologise gently and say it’s all your fault”)—well, it wasn’t all his fault and he couldn’t even get Jack to listen in the first place so it was pretty useless advice.

He hadn’t managed to find anything else out about the caravan either. Holwood’s staff were tight-lipped about the incident and wouldn’t even confirm whether the sick driver was still alive and with them. He had even attempted to talk to Holwood’s wife but had to bail on that avenue of enquiry when she wouldn’t stop insulting her “poor quality” staff and the birth status of the other mercs. Gabriel had made a hasty excuse to ride off ahead before he had a chance to strangle her for making a derisive comment about Lidia.

The caravan itself continued to wind its way through the foothills of the mountains. If Gabriel’s sense of geography was anything to go by (and he had a very good sense of direction), then they would enter the Northern passes tomorrow. They wound their way past the occasional farmstead, but it was mostly rocky hills and sheep grazing land. 

When they did stop for dinner the tension in the camp was palpable. Gabriel ate with the group for the first time after Rake and Daden said they didn’t mind scars, but Jack got up and stalked off immediately when he sat inside the circle of fire. Nobody said anything though. They seemed to get that it was a touchy subject.

When it was time for the evening watch, Gabriel requested the first one. It was their turn in any case, and he didn’t want Jack to have to come anywhere near him to wake him up if he didn’t want to.

Jack must have been thinking the same thing because as soon as everyone had bedded down he muttered, “I’ll take the North.” Then stalked off to the opposite side of the camp.

You know what? Fine then. He wouldn’t apologise if Jack was going to be like that.

Jack was acting like a child. He had no idea what Past-Gabe had seen in Jack because all he could detect was arrogance.

It didn’t help that he still felt like he had disappointed Jack somehow. It all swirled round and round in his head and only served to annoy him further. He huffed out a breath and turned to find a good vantage point to spend his watch on, ending up on a rocky platform at the top of a small hill.

He cleared his mind by marvelling at the stars and revelling in the chill air that breathed across his face. A much better start to the evening than last night had been.

After settling his hands into a more comfortable position, Gabriel glanced around. Immediately, he picked out the exact location of where Jack had set up his watch, his enormous feathered hat on the ground beside him.

Gabriel looked away. Then he frowned.

And felt a compulsion to look over in that direction again. His eye twitched and he very pointedly looked in the other direction, more than a little annoyed at himself.

He decided to count the sheep in the fields.

Two hundred and twenty-seven…that was as many sheep as his eyes could pick out in the night.

That was a lot of fucking sheep.

He glanced over at Jack.

Sitting on a similar rocky hill on the other side of the camp, Jack had his back to Gabriel and was staring up at the stars. His shoulders were hunched, the hood of his coat down, revealing the pale white hair reflecting the moonlight—

Gabriel looked away. Shit.

The rest of the watch crawled by. He couldn’t help but glance in Jack’s direction, hating himself more and more every time he realised what he was doing. Until finally, after nearly three hours of distracted glances in Jack’s direction, he found that pair of blue eyes staring right back at him.

Gabriel stared.

Jack stared back.

From this distance he couldn’t pick out Jack’s features but he could swear that a pale blonde eyebrow was slowly making its way up Jack’s forehead.

Gabriel kept staring. Besides, if he looked away now, it could be seen as a sign of weakness. Jack didn’t look away either. Instead, he slowly spun himself around so he was facing Gabriel, and seemed to intensify the stare.

Gabriel narrowed his eyes and threw his shoulders forward. There, take that you blue-eyed demon.

He tried not to think about how stupid this was. Or how much they were both potentially putting the camp in danger. But Gabriel had priorities.

They stayed like that for a good five minutes and during that time Gabriel watched Jack’s face slowly crack apart, his lips twitching up and then break into a grin that flashed his teeth all the way across the camp.

Finally, Jack just threw back his head and laughed. It was a quiet laugh—probably not wanting to wake the camp—but it was a laugh all the same. It drifted across the space to Gabriel, sounding like some of the most beautiful music he had ever heard. At that particular thought he felt the blood rise to his face and he pinched the bridge of his nose—both embarrassed at himself but also unable to shake the feeling that was the reason for the smile that had crept onto his face, as hideous as it may be.

When Gabriel glanced back in Jack’s direction and caught his eye again, Jack nodded towards the sleeping figures. Time for the watch change?

Gabriel shook his head, he was wide awake now and no amount of sheep counting was ever going to get him to sleep again. They may as well watch through the night. Let the others rest.

Jack paused for a moment and then pointed at Gabriel. Mind if I come over there?

Gabriel froze. He could refuse. He still wasn’t sure if he wanted anything to do with Jack, or if Jack wanted anything to do with him.

But he didn’t refuse. He shrugged instead, leaving that up to Jack to interpret. He turned his gaze wider, watching for any threat that wasn’t two hundred and twenty-seven sheep. After a minute he heard the soft crunch of boots on dew-frozen grass.

“Mind if I come up?” Jack asked quietly from below him.

Gabriel shrugged again, looking up at the stars.

“Wow, warm reception,” suddenly Jack’s voice was incredibly close, making Gabriel whip his head around in surprise. Jack grinned from above him, now standing on the highest part of the rock. He jumped down, landing feather light and with more grace than a dancer. He didn’t sit close to Gabriel, choosing instead to keep a perfectly respectable distance between them.

Gabriel didn’t know whether to be relieved or insulted. But it wasn’t as if he cared any—

“The stars are nice tonight,” Jack murmured.

He grunted in reply. This was a mistake, Jack was just going to talk all night.

But his fears were allayed when Jack fell silent after that, appearing content to simply sit near him and watch the camp and sky from there.

Gabriel meanwhile could not concentrate on anything.

A strange feeling had begun at the base of his stomach—it wasn’t the beast, he’d know if it was the beast. And it wasn’t an attack like last night. No, this was much more… pleasant? It was a jittery feeling, and one that kept making him want to glance at Jack. One that made him want to see this strange man for what he really was. Wanted to look at the contours of his face and body and wonder if he had ever loved him.

Perilous thoughts.

Gabriel deliberately turned his head to the south. But the jittery feeling stayed. His hands twitched, restless in their cages tonight and he entertained the idea of taking his gloves off. But he didn’t. Exposing his skin was too dangerous—besides the general horror of his hands falling apart and putting themselves back together. He didn’t want to take any unnecessary risks.

They sat in silence for another few hours. Jack made barely a sound, almost as if he wasn’t breathing.

Meanwhile Gabriel was trying to calm this nervous storm that was rising in him, thoughts crashing and falling over themselves like a restless tide.

Then Jack began to hum. The song was soft. Low and dark, it heralded the first touches of predawn light. It was melancholy, and as it drifted on Gabriel relaxed. The restlessness inside him calmed.

The song changed. And suddenly Gabriel felt a deep, unsettling sense of déjà vu wash over him as he sharply turned his head to Jack, mouth half-open in a question—

Jack was waiting. The blue eyes pierced him, trapped him in their gaze as Jack cut the song off, his lips curled up in a satisfied smile. “Do you remember it?” he asked quietly.

Gabriel’s nostrils flared, but he shook his head, annoyed he had given so much away. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I don’t have much of a memory.”

Jack sighed. It was a weary sigh; something that seemed more appropriate for someone far older than Jack looked.

The sky grew lighter, stars slowly disappearing. The chill wind had begun to blow harder from the mountains, funnelling down from the pass. At least the sun would shine today, Gabriel thought. It was little consolation to him after this disaster of a night. Because that restless feeling, like a merry fire burning happily in his stomach, was still there. It had returned tenfold and made him grind his teeth in frustration as he forced himself not to throw tiny glances at Jack.

A rustling of clothes next to him finally broke the silence and Gabriel deemed that it would be not weird to look at Jack and see what he was doing.

He almost burst into laughter but just managed to catch himself at the last second and turn it into a loud snort instead. Jack froze, just short of tucking the last bit of a long scarf he was winding around his head to cover every inch of his face. He was also wearing gloves now.

They stared at each other.

“What are you doing?” Gabriel finally asked when it became apparent that Jack wasn’t going to be the one to speak first.

Jack finished tucking the scarf in, leaving just a slit for his eyes to look out of. Then he jammed his outrageously large hat on his head, completing his new fashion statement with aplomb only he could manage. “I take sun safety very seriously,” came Jack’s muffled voice.

Gabriel’s eyebrows shot up so quickly he was afraid they would disappear up into the sky. He glanced east where the first rays of dawn were creeping over the horizon. “Riiiiight. And do you also sleep in a coffin at night?”

He couldn’t see Jack’s expression under the scarf but the blue eyes narrowed to slits. His own smile widened.

“Don’t like garlic?”

Jack pushed off from the rock and started walking back to the camp.

Gabriel jumped off after him, his own landing far less graceful because Jack made landing on the uneven ground look practically effortless. “Seduce beautiful women in your demonic gaze?” he called after Jack’s receding back.

Jack came to a juddering halt. Then he turned to Gabriel, catching him up in a blue-eyed stare. “Actually, you’re wrong on all three counts.”

Gabriel suddenly couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe as he was caught up in those blue eyes, staring at him like a predator would its prey.

“I don’t sleep in a coffin. In fact, I don’t sleep at all. I don’t eat either, but I’ll have you know that I used to love garlic and miss eating it a lot. And I don’t seduce women.”

Jack paused, moved his head up so that he was looking down on Gabriel smugly, blue eyes on fire. “I much prefer men.”

And then he turned back around and strode into the camp. Gabriel clutched at his chest, blinking furiously when he was finally able to move again. And finally, the warm sun hit his ruined face, fuelling the merry glow in his stomach into a roaring fire, and leaving Gabriel wondering what the hell he had gotten himself into.

Chapter Text

Oh shit.

Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit—

The panicked words tumbled through his mind as Jack swiftly walked back into camp.

He kept his head down, brim of the hat taking the full brunt of the morning sun, watching which way he turned lest he get an eyeful of it and be left with ash for eyeballs. It was about the most unpleasant thing that could happen to him—besides the occasional blood drinking—and it happened when he was distracted. And he was very distracted.

Because he’d just told Gabriel he was a vampire. Just…straight-up admitted it.

Jack smirked, well, maybe not straight.

He shook his head vigorously, focus on the crisis at hand! He was a godsforsaken monster. Like out of a horror story told to children on dark winter nights. A creature that should be put to death, cleansed of this earth.

And now Gabriel knew.

Well it’s not like I tried to hide it, he attempted to rationalise. Anyone with half a brain could see the signs. Whether or not Gabriel believed his own eyes was his problem.

Oh gods, he had used the creepy eye power on him. He’d promised himself he would never use it again. It was wrong, a gift born of corruption he didn’t want. But lo and behold, here he was attempting to seduce his lost love with unholy vampiric powers.

Gabriel was asking for it, he tried, but nope, his brain was not having that either. Gabriel was an unwitting victim to your poor self-control and willingness to show off, it lectured him.

Then Jack laughed, muffled as it was under his enormous scarf wrapped around his entire head. Gabe, a victim? Nah.

Gabriel, however…

Jack took a deep breath. Remembering once again that Gabriel was not Gabe. And Gabriel was definitely a victim. Of what? Jack had his guesses but he buried them at the back of his mind for now. It was far too early in the morning for that kind of confrontation with the past.

The man with Gabe’s face was strange though. One moment he didn’t want anything to do with Jack—which was why he’d turned the cold shoulder and decided to just let it go. Take the merchant’s money and run before they ever reached Gibraltar. But apparently, Gabriel had other ideas. The tiny furtive looks he had received for half a night had not gone unnoticed.

It reminded him of something. Stirred a memory from long ago.

And then it hit him—Gabriel reminded him of himself.

Years and years ago, when they had first met and Gabe hadn’t looked at him twice. Or so he had thought. He had spent at least half of his training as a soldier distracted by his handsome officer and it had taken Gabe half an age to finally throw a couple of looks back his way. Mind you, the way Gabe told it—used to tell it—was that he had been into Jack from the start.

His duty was the only thing stopping him from making a move. They had a war to win. And of course, there was his social standing to consider.

That went out the window after the Siege of Lunar Keep when a haggard, tired commander had searched an entire battlefield for him. He remembers Gabe’s wide eyes and jagged breathes, almost coming out in sobs when he found Jack huddled around a campfire with the few other soldiers that had survived. The emotions that had flitted across Gabe’s face in that moment stayed with Jack always. Relief, pain, worry, concern, and finally a timid nervousness that seemed to overtake the swaggering commander and master tactician of the King’s armies as he licked his lips and asked whether Jack wanted to get a drink. To celebrate. With him. Alone.

Jack remembers smiling, his battered and beaten body complaining as he stood up and strode over to his commander. He gently reached up and pulled Gabriel in close and kissed him. Long and slow, Jack had put his soul into that kiss and given it to Gabe.

He remembers the euphoria of that moment. Of survival. He was alive and sharing the warmth of Gabe’s arms. Finally.

Now that he thinks about it, they never did get that drink.

The caravan wound its way up into the hills, sheep country giving way to bandit country. Jagged rocks rose high above the exposed carts and the road became frosty and treacherous as it narrowed the higher they climbed. There had been rock falls in the past, small boulders blocking their way and slowing their path.

They were strung out in single file now, walking through a light dusting of snow in the afternoon, pulling furs and coats in close against the chill. As they entered the pass proper, high stone walls towering above them, it became too sheltered for even the snowflakes to make it to the ground.

Gabriel didn't like it. He didn’t like the way they were exposed or the way they had to begin to move in single file or the way that there was no escape if they were attacked. He began scouting further and further ahead, looking for anything out of place; the source of the reason the hair on the back of his neck had begun to stand up when they walked through certain sections of the mountainous path.

Occasionally they would pass fallen stone structures, toppled long ago by the slow march of time. Ancient writings carved into weathered stone. Perhaps they were once statues of worship for the old gods, now long forgotten.

It was during one of the slower parts of the day, as the mercs waited for the carts to cross a particularly treacherous bit of road, when Lidia came to walk beside him.

Gabriel raised an eyebrow, curious at what she could want.

“I am hoping you don’t find me rude,” she began, “and I understand if you don’t answer, but I was hoping I could ask you about your scars.” She spoke slowly, choosing every word with delicate care.

He licked his lips under his scarf, wondering where this could possibly be going but motioned for her to continue.

“You really don’t know how you got them?”

“No.” The answer came out a little sharper than he intended and Lidia drew a breath and stepped back.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked—

“It’s ok.” He sighed and slowly began walking again, leading Midnight behind him. He didn’t owe her an answer—he barely knew her—but he found himself wanting to tell someone about what had happened to him.

He took a deep breath, “I… I have only been alive for ten years. I have no idea who I was before then and I don’t particularly want to know.”

“Oh.” There was a pause and then he felt a light touch on his shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

He shrugged and sidestepped away from her hand. “I try not to think too hard about what kind of person this body used to belong to. He must have been into some freaky shit to leave me with a legacy of amnesia, scars and bad dreams.”

And a hunger that won’t be sated, but he decided it would be best not to mention that.

Lidia nodded sagely. “Do you mind if I have another look?”

“Look,” Gabriel said, “don’t touch.”

She nodded sagely, brow furrowing into deep thought as he pulled down the scarf. Then she nodded, as if confirming something in her mind. “I have seen this kind of scarring before. I could tell you where, but I understand if you don’t want to know.”

Gabriel felt she’d punched him in the stomach. The revelations just kept on coming and he wasn’t prepared for them. But maybe… maybe if he knew a bit more about the scars he might be able to fix them.

He gave a half shrug and waited to see if Lidia would take it as a confirmation.

She did.

“When I was a child, during the wars far in the North, I had a brush with death.” She shivered and shoved her hands deeper into her furs. “I had the gift of healing, and even as weak as it was, because of it I was not spared from the conflict. I was there during the battles in which the fate of life hung in the balance. A knife edge holding back the old gods. And all I could do was try to heal fallen soldiers who were not so badly wounded that they were beyond my skill to save. I would pick through the fields after it was over. After we had somehow clawed victory from the clutches of death, trying to find anyone still alive and worth saving…

“It was there that I found the Necromancer. He was close to death, threaded by a spear and missing an arm, the tattered cloth tied around his mouth coming loose and covered in blood. But he was somehow clinging to life. I remember his eyes and how they were full of fear of the very death that he sought to defy. And I remember him trying to coax me to save him. ‘Just a touch, child. Let me hold your hand before I go.’”

Gabriel sucked in a breath, hardly believing what he was hearing.

Lidia continued to talk, oblivious to his reaction, lost in her own memories. “I didn’t. I could…tell, that something wasn’t quite right. I watched over him as he died. When the light left his eyes, they clouded over and from beneath the bandages covering his mouth something emerged.”

Lidia was quiet for a moment. “It-it was like a black smoke, vile and formless as a shadow and it clawed its way free, screaming as it went. It was unearthly. I remember feeling a terrible hunger come over me as I watched. And then… it was gone.”

Lidia looked up at him and must have seen the fear in his eyes because she tried to give him a reassuring smile. “I don’t know what it was. I… didn’t tell anyone for years afterwards and most of them didn’t believe me. But I did pull back the bandages after I was sure he was dead…and… he had the same scars as you.”

It took Gabriel a moment to find his voice and when he did all he could manage was a hoarse whisper. “Who was he?”

“Tal Rasha.”

“The Tal Rashsa?” he hissed. “The one who led an army of ten thousand dead? The same guy who raised the City of Angels to the ground?”

Lidia nodded.

Gabriel threw up his arms. “Great, so maybe I was a shitty necromancer in a past life. Perfect. Wonderful. Just what I needed.”

“I don’t think you were a necromancer,” she murmured.

He clenched his teeth, suddenly feeling the fury rise up at how little control he had over himself and his personhood. Still. After a decade. This was why he didn’t want to know things.

“You don’t know that. I certainly don’t know that.”

“Gabriel,” she said quietly. “I think you are a good person.”

“You. Don’t. Know. Me.” He said through gritted teeth. I barely know myself.

“No. I don’t know you.” Lidia put her arms around her chest and hugged herself. “But I can tell you are just the same as the rest of us trying to make our way in this weary messed-up world.” And with that, she walked off, leaving him alone with his thoughts.

*

On the second night, they camped in the ruins of a temple. It was high enough in the mountains that there was barely any wood for a fire and so the mercs spent most of that night shivering, awake and as close as they could get to each other.

Gabriel stayed away from that type of comradery after the horrific revelations of yesterday. He tried not to let it put him in a sour mood—it wasn’t exactly new information—just a potential path to an answer for the beast that slumbered inside him. It didn’t mean anything.

He noticed that Jack also chose not to accept the invitation to warmth, muttering something about not feeling the cold.

He was almost thankful that the eerie feeling of the mountains was distracting him enough so that he didn’t have to think about what kind of dark creature Jack had admitted to being.

But a vampire? Really?

They were creatures out of a fairy tale. Supposed monsters who drank the blood of innocents to survive. It did make him realise that while he hadn’t seen Jack drink any blood yet, he also hadn’t seen him eat any food at all.

In his endeavour to try and figure out what he was dealing with, he spent nearly as much time watching Jack as he did watching for danger when he returned to the caravan after scouting ahead.

Jack acted normal enough when he thought people were watching him. But there were a few moments when he would move a little too fast, or notice a noise, head moving curiously in its direction long before it registered to the rest of them. And of course, there was the way he was careful not to tilt his hat so that he was exposed to the sun. Not that there was much of that anymore, the mountains darkening with heavy storm clouds blowing in from the North.

To be entirely honest, Gabriel didn’t particularly care if Jack was a creature out of a horror story. And after talking with Lidia, it would be more than a little hypocritical of him to pass judgement in any case.

The fact was, that Jack wasn’t even the strangest occurrence he was dealing with after having nonchalantly tried to investigate the carts for the missing driver and turning up nothing. He hadn’t been able to get very close, but as far as he could tell, the driver was simply gone. How Holwood had managed to bury the body (Gabriel doubted very much he was still alive) without a single one of them noticing was beyond him. But there was no rotting corpse smell. No groans of pain from the back of the carts. Just the steady bump of the wheels and the occasional snort from the horses as they steadily moved accross the mountains.

And, of course, how could he forget Lord Holwood’s never-ending stream of blustering abuse and barely-held-in-check contempt for his staff. It was a blessing to have an excuse to ride ahead of the caravan for a couple of hours each day just to get away from that raging idiot.

On the fourth night they camped underneath a rocky ledge, the path sheering off down a cliff on the right side of them. It was a clear night, wind whistling between the cliffs, making the few scraggly trees that had managed to cling to life creak and groan with complaint.

They were close to the end of their watch, most of it spent in what Gabriel would call an awkward silence. Jack seemed disinclined to begin a conversation, a somewhat embarrassed air hanging over him as he watched the quiet mountains.

He, on the other hand, spent most of it trying to figure out what he wanted to say to Jack first.

There were plenty of pressing questions, all of them with dangerous answers.

For him, at least.

Do you really want to know? The sentiment echoed through his mind whenever he would draw breath to ask and he would sigh it out, resigning himself to ignorant silence.

Ignorance was safe. Or so he had thought. The conversation with Lidia had shaken him, made him confront the fact that perhaps running away from his past, his self-that-was-not-self... maybe that wasn’t such a good idea.

The question was, could he ever be free of it?

Gabriel leaned away from that thought. A decade of wandering around with an insatiable hunger inside had taught him not to hope for anything.

He decided to distract himself by mustering the courage to ask something that had hovered haphazardly around his mind since he had first met Jack, way back on that midlands road.

“What’s your house name?”

Jack blinked at him, clearly confused by the sudden question.

“Your crest?”

“Uh?”

“You’re a noble.” He spelled it out slowly. “What’s your house name?”

Jack’s eyes suddenly went wide and then he burst out laughing.

Gabriel backed it up for a moment. “Wait. Are you a noble?”

Every time Jack looked like he had gained enough composure to answer he would take one look at Gabriel and subside back into a fit of giggles. It gave him the uncomfortable feeling that he was missing out on some big joke.

When Jack finally controlled his face again he chose to arrange it in the most affronted look Gabriel had ever received.

Jack held up a finger, looking for a moment as though he was trying to fight his own smile before thinning his lips into a straight line. “Firstly, how dare you. And secondly, how, in the name of all that is unholy did you come to that conclusion?”

Gabriel blinked. “Well, you dress like,” he waved in Jack’s general direction, “that. And you don’t listen to other people. Also, you’re an idiot with a bad cover story and only nobles think commoners are dumb enough to believe you’re just wandering around the Midlands in a ridiculous coat with no belongings or money.”

“What’s wrong with my coat?” He fluffed up the white fur collar indignantly and crossed his embroidered, silk-adorned arms.

“It’s a little ostentatious wouldn’t you say?”

“I won it in a card game—

“That makes it even worse! Why would you ever accept that buy in?”

“You don’t know what I put into the pot,” Jack said and flashed his teeth.

Gabriel briefly closed his eyes. “Also, your hat is tacky and I hate it.”

Jack shook his head sadly. “You’ve changed… At least I don’t look like some kind of depressed dungeon keeper who’s into leather belts.”

Gabriel felt his jaw drop open as he tried to resist the temptation to look down at himself. “That’s rich, coming from the guy who looks softer than whipped cream.” A blatant lie; Jack’s jaw looked like it could cut stone and he certainly didn’t have a dainty body hidden underneath the coat.

“Oh?” Jack’s eyes glistened dangerously in the starlight for a moment. “Do you want me to show you just how hard I can be?”

Gabriel resisted the urge to swallow and looked away instead, face burning. He decided to drag the conversation back on track. “So, you’re not a noble.”

 “No. Definitely not.”

“Then, what are you?”

There was a pause. Jack chewed on the question for a moment, a tiny frown pulling on his scar. Then he sighed quietly and looked Gabriel in the eye. “I don’t know anymore.”

“What were you?” Gabriel tried not to think about how dangerous that question was for him. The beast inside seemed to shift for a moment in its slumber, perhaps feeling his own nervousness. He soothed it back to sleep, remembering to breathe and telling himself that it was just curiosity for curiosity’s sake. He didn’t care for the answer.

“Are you sure you want to know?”

No.

…Yes.

In lieu of answering, he decided that silence would reveal the truth. He let it stretch until he felt a tinge of fear that maybe Jack wasn’t going to answer—

“Gabe called me ‘farm boy’ from the moment he met me.” Jack leaned back and gave him another sly look out of the corner of his eye. “It was accurate. I was a boy from a farm. But I had come to him to be a soldier and he was somewhat taken aback when he found out just how rough we farm boys can be.” Jack paused and then his face turned serious, tone sombre. “Farm boy. That’s what I was for the first sixteen years of my life. Something that now seems untouchable, that possibility is so far gone. If things had been different, perhaps I would be sitting in front of a roaring hearth, eating winter stew, an old man by now. Maybe some nieces and nephews running around beneath my feet. It wouldn’t have been such a bad life.”

Jack’s wistful tone had caught him up already but the mention of being an ‘old man’ had him frowning at his mental maths. “You can’t be past thirty summers, surely?”

“I’m forty-three.”

Gabriel peered into the half-light, tried to squint and see whether he could spot the missing years on Jack’s face, but no, it was smooth. Somewhat ageless with only the jagged scars that were sure to tell a bitter tale. He shifted on the hard dirt and pulled his coat closer around himself, uncomfortable at his own rabid curiosity and the growing sense of dread that he wanted to know more about this strange man.

A dangerous road he treaded. He might not like the answers Jack could give.

But he wanted to know.

“What happened?”

Jack gave a humourless snort. “Someone thought it would be a good idea to summon the old gods back to this world. Bind the dead and raise the bones in service to their dark power. I don’t know where you’ve been or what you know, but everyone on this continent was affected by the Omniscient Wars. My home was scoured, our lands burned. I somehow escaped, joined the army, became a soldier. But we were losing. Desperate. The King’s alchemists—

Jack bit off the tumble of words and stopped.

This gave Gabriel a moment to process the fact that Jack had fought in battles that he had heard as tales and songs in crowded tavern rooms during a decade of wandering. The Omniscient Wars were legendary in the Southern Kingdoms. Jack was right, they hadn’t been as affected as the North or Midland Fiefdoms, but the army of the dead had claimed swaths of land and lives as they began their march south. The only thing that stood in their way—

“Anyway,” Jack said quietly, “we did it. We defeated them. But there were… things left over. Dark magic, corrupted bloodlines. Necromancers thrived in the years after the war, not just in the North, but South and East as well. It took a long time to root them out.”

Gabriel frowned. “Who is we?”

Jack gave him a strange look before returning his gaze to the stars. “Overwatch. The Kingdom of Gibraltar’s elite guard. The paladins who stood in the way of the dead. Those brave enough to face the gods and win.” His mouth twisted into a horrid grimace. “At least, until we were corrupted, just like the very monsters we fought.”

Gabriel had heard of this too. The Fall of Overwatch. Their last battle fought in the Zurich Pass. It was whispered that they had been betrayed by dark magic. A surviving god. Or perhaps it was a Vampire. Or a Witch. Or an Alchemist. Or maybe a new warrior rumoured to be in possession of the Gauntlet of Doom. Most of the stories had been whispered around tavern hearths by those too drunk to care about who might be listening. Besides, they were safe from such creatures in the South. The North could deal with its own problems.

Gabriel felt Jack looking at him. Waiting for something.

He sighed. “Who are you?”

“John, son of Morris.”

Gabriel whipped his head up so fast he almost felt something snap. “What?”

Jack’s blue eyes were uncompromising. “I’ve always gone by Jack though.”

That was not the answer he was expecting.

He was staring at a legend. There was no way. No. Way. Commander Morrison. Nah. Forget it. There were a number of problems with that declaration, the most pressing being that Commander Morrison was as dead as Overwatch.

He squinted, trying to align the woodcuts and tapestries he had seen of the magnificent golden-haired warrior in resplendent armour—the man who had fought gods and won—with the strange, otherworldly creature in a gaudy coat he had won in a card game sitting before him.

It was difficult, but perhaps he could glimpse it, on the edge of the starlight, a man without defeat in his eyes. A man who didn’t look like he carried his loss upon his back and longed to join his burden. But then he blinked and it was gone. Jack moved like a shadow. And if Commander Morrison cast a long one, then Jack stood in the darkest part.

Which left him wondering that if Jack was telling the truth—and he had an unsettling feeling that he was—then where did Gabriel fit into all of this?

Presumably, he had fought alongside Jack… as a soldier… which wasn’t that much of a stretch considering the various skills he had slowly discovered he possessed. But that also somewhat confirmed something horrible had happened for him to end up with no memory, a tonne of un-survivable looking scars, and a dark power trapped under his skin.

“Who am I?” he whispered, not really thinking about the tumbled words he had uttered aloud, but which cut through the cacophony of questions tumbling through his head like a scythe through wheat.  

Jack took a deep breath and opened his mouth to speak when they both heard the footsteps.

Lidia yawned as she slowly picked her way over the rocky ground towards them. Gabriel flicked his eyes back to Jack, but the fleeting moment was gone, Jack’s jaw firmly set and, if he wasn’t imagining it, a brief flash of relief before his face closed off.

“I thought I’d come and relieve you both early since you didn’t get any sleep the other night,” Lidia said, giving them a brief smile.

Jack had nodded and was on his feet before Gabriel even had a chance to move. “Thank you,” he murmured and walked swiftly back to camp without another word and leaving both Gabriel and Lidia staring at his back, confused.

He got to his feet, dragging a hand through his hair and groaning at his aching bones.

“Are you ok?” Lidia asked as she peered up at him. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Or maybe I’ve just met one, he thought. “I’m fine,” he said out loud. “Been a long day. Goodnight, Lidia. Jade.” He gave a nod to her companion who was apparently not an early, early morning person since she looked like death as she stumbled over to the watch point. Then he made his way back towards the huddle of bodies around the warm coals.

He wondered how he was ever going to sleep with the amount of questions in his head, each louder than the last, like some forsaken choir of forgotten memories.

Luckily he didn’t have to wonder for long at all, asleep the moment he hit the ground.

Jack cursed himself. He cursed his own cowardice and the fear that had been steadily rising inside him since Gabriel had begun to ask questions.

Because he wasn’t going to like the answers.

The shame was there too. Always ready to squeeze his throat with its tenacity and remind him of exactly why he was a fool for telling Gabriel anything. Which gave way to his greatest fear that had pierced him deeper than any blade he had ever taken:

What if Gabriel left him again?

He didn’t think he had the strength to live through that a second time.

He hadn’t the first time.

And look where that had got him.

Jack put an arm over his face and listened to the quiet breathing of his companions in their sleep. The unevenness of Gabriel’s shortened breaths made him think that he was dreaming again. More than anything right now he wanted to go over there and lay next to him. Hold him. Be held.

Jack clenched his teeth against the wave of longing that coursed through him. It crashed over his cold skin and almost made him shiver with its force. He was swept up in it, in the memories he cradled. Shattered, fragile fragments that cut his hands and heart as he pulled them close.

It was always like this. He could never escape it. The simple fact that Gabe was gone.

Only...

Perhaps that was no longer entirely true.

Jack sighed. Even he knew that this tiny bit of hope he clung to like a life raft as he rode this tumultuous ocean was nothing but a fool’s dream.

Good thing Jack was a fool.

*

The morning brought with it fresh snow, fat snowflakes coating the camp like a dusting of icing sugar.

Jack didn’t have the will to face Gabriel after the conversation last night and elected to keep his head down, receiving only an unimpressed frown before Gabriel rode off into the slowly falling blanket of white, Midnight’s hooves barely making a sound on the rocky mountain path. He wouldn’t be back for a while. At this point, he was convinced that Gabriel used ‘scouting’ as an excuse to get away from Holwood’s incessant complaining.

Jack watched him go, mentally kicking himself. Could he be any more of a useless idiot?

The caravan began to move. The snow deadened the sound of their passing to creaking harnesses and the steady plodding of the mercenarys’ boots as they walked through the high walls of the pass. Occasionally they would come across side paths that seemed to lead to nowhere and once his keen eyes caught a glimpse of movement, fluid and lithe, it was gone before he could focus on it. He kept an eye out for snow panthers after that.

He was distracted from his thoughts when Jade and Lidia dropped back to walk beside him as they ate lunch on the move. They were travelling as fast as they could to make it out of the pass by tomorrow.

“Jack?” Lidia began quietly.

“Mmm?”

“Do you know anything about what happened to that driver?”

He looked at her and shook his head. “No. I couldn’t find him. There seems to be no trace of him around the caravans.”

“He’s not in them either.”

Jack raised his eyebrows.

“I went looking last night,” said Jade. “Nada. He’s completely gone. Also we’re transporting a fuckload of contraband. No wonder Holwood could afford two sorcerers.”

“Gone?” Jack murmured. Then, “wait, what kind of contraband.”

Jade shrugged. “It was pretty dark, but at least two of those carts is full of potions. The other seems to be organic material? I couldn’t really tell. Dried plants? For some reason it didn’t smell like anything.”

Ah, so that explained why he couldn’t sense much. Holwood must have some kind of warding on the carts.

“There’s no body,” Jade continued. “Like, I don’t know… did he get dissolved by that green smoke? He looked pretty rough when it happened.”

“I’ve seen the smoke once before,” Jack said. “But I don’t know what it does.”

Lidia frowned at him. “Where?”

“North?” he tried.

“When was this—

Jack suddenly held up a hand, cutting her off. He frowned and concentrated on the beating that was just barely on the edge of his hearing.

Hooves.

Galloping.

His eyes went wide as he realised there was more than one set.

“Alert, now!” Jack hissed at them as he motioned to the rest of the caravan. Jade opened her mouth but Jack ran ahead.

“Stop the caravan!” he tried to be as quiet as he could, the other mercs were already moving into defensive positions as Jack ran to the front and faced Lord Holwood.

The man was blustering. “What is the meaning of—

“Something is coming. Move the caravan off the path and as close to the canyon wall as you can,” Jack commanded.

Holwood gave an unimpressed, “tch,” but did as he had asked.

They all moved closer together, minimising the target. Holwood’s staff looked frightened.

The galloping got louder and louder until it was almost a thunderstorm when, finally, the others heard it.

Jade slid her blade free as Lidia bounced on the balls of her toes, wooden staff at the ready. Rake moved forwards and drew his great axe while Daden took cover just behind a cart and restlessly tossed a knife in his hand.

Holwood looked as though he was about to say something when a figure in all black, with his tattered coat streaming behind him, rounded the corner of the path and began to ride straight at them.

He was closely followed by six other riders, faces covered by tatty blue rags, and with their swords out baying for blood.

Gabriel glanced behind him and spurred Midnight on. Just as he saw Jack he pointed up to the ridge on his right. “Ambush!” His deep, gravelly voice echoed through the walls of the canyon.

Jack skimmed his eyes over the rocky ground above them, trying to see what his senses had missed while his body surged forward in an attempt to meet Gabriel—

A flicker.

A black streak through the air.

If Jack’s heart had still been beating, it would have seized.

Too late.

He was too late.

Again.

He reached out, barely fifty metres away—

Gabriel lurched forward in the saddle as the arrow went straight through his neck.

A spray of red blood, the scent of stale iron flying through the air.

Gabriel fell.

Chapter Text

It felt as if time had frozen for him.

Here he was—standing in shallow snow on the edge of a kingdom watching Gabriel fall as he clutched at the arrow in his bloodied neck

and there Jack kneeled—stripped and chained as the cursed blade twisted into Gabe’s chest and the shadow swallowed them both

—time began to melt through him.

Gabriel’s body slammed into the ground, red spraying over snow as the riders curved around him, yelling as they went.

Jack inhaled—

Iron. Ice. Wind. Sweat. 

Fear.

He could taste it almost. The world became heightened, slower. Jack spent years waiting between one of the thundering hooves of the bandit’s horses to hit the earth and the next.

Behind him, Rake and Jade bellowed war cries at the oncoming ambush, voices pulsing around the mountains, flooding in and out of valleys and through his head.

Jack heard leaping footfalls. The brush of leather armour and the soft ‘shick’ of blades sliding free of their scabbards. The slide of rocks and shale down the western slope above them. Without looking, he knew that there was at least ten more attackers rushing down the mountainside.

He exhaled.

The wind changed direction.

A snowflake drifted in front of his eyes, one way then the next.

He blinked.

And when Jack opened his eyes again, all he saw was red.

Between one step and the next, he leapt forward, a roar of his own building inside until the scream of pain and rage and anguish burst from his chest.

How dare they?

Hadn’t he lost enough already?

He aimed for the middle two riders just as Midnight streamed past him with her empty saddle.

He feinted left, ducking under the first rider’s sword and catching their ankle in his grasp. Jack didn’t let his momentum slow and used his low position to leap straight up, other hand out and aiming at the second rider’s throat.

The first rider was not prepared as Jack yanked them up and over the back of their saddle, leg twisting unnaturally as their body turned the opposite way to where Jack’s stone grip was taking it. There was a ‘crick’ and a pop and the first rider screamed as Jack let go, already forgetting about them as his other hand closed around the neck of the second rider.

The bandit made a chocking noise before Jack cut off their air completely. He squeezed as they flew through the air, both the riders’ horses continuing on without either of them in the saddles.

He kept closing his grip like a vice. Felt his fingers pierce the skin and bite into muscle and sinew and still he continued. Slow and steady in the few seconds of freefall he watched the rider’s wide-eyed stare slacken as the life left their eyes.

When they slammed into the ground Jack still didn’t let go.

The force of impact would have caused his old body several bruised and bloodied bones but he rolled once, twice—until he willed his body to stop moving by planting his feet steady in the snow, letting gravity take care of the rider’s.

He was left holding a chunk of the rider’s neck in his fist. Sinew, muscle and blood dripping down his fingers, already cooling in the chill air.

In his red haze, he lifted the steaming mess up to his mouth and licked a line clean. The blood hit his tongue, bursting into life as it trickled down his throat.

He wanted to revel in it. Dance with the ecstasy it brought as his veins leapt at the chance to be of use again—

He heard a groan behind him.

A ragged breath that shuddered into a sob as he slowly turned around and looked at the first rider. They were scrabbling backwards in the snow, one leg twisted around horribly and dragging useless behind them. Jack began to walk towards them. The rider sobbed aloud this time, almost wailing as they tried to claw themself away from his silent steps.

He stood over them and they froze.

“Die,” Jack whispered and slammed his boot into the rider’s face. He heard the crunch of bones as the rider’s face collapsed against the force of his stomp. It wasn’t that Jack’s boots were hard, it was that his foot was uncompromising. He willed it to continue to the ground regardless of what lay in his way.

He smiled through the red haze—

A gasp. A wet cough. Jack whirled around and saw Gabe one hand clawing at the snow in front of him as he tried to hold back the red tide gushing from his neck with the other.

Jack too a step towards Gabe.

Gabe…

Jack blinked.

Gabriel.

The landscape was stark white against black again as he rushed forward, leaving the bloodied, broken body of the rider behind.

He was ready to drop to his knees and reach for Gabriel in his arms. Stem the flow of blood himself and pray to any surviving gods out there for a miracle. He would give up his own existence to not lose Gabe again.

He reached out to pull him into his arms—

And came to a dead stop as Gabriel looked up at him, golden eyes wide with a fear so intense that Jack’s instincts kicked in and his body froze as it tried to figure out where the threat was and if he should fight or run.

Gabriel clutched his neck in one hand and desperately tried to use the other to ward off Jack. He was shaking his head in tiny movements, tears in his eyes.

Don’t come any closer.

Gabriel’s scarf had come loose, his jagged teeth visible through the scarred, blood-flecked lips.

He coughed and red flecks sprayed across the white snow.

Jack took a step forward, unable to stay away. He reached out even as Gabriel’s head shaking intensified and he backed up further.

Then, Jack saw it.

The blood in the snow. Little red droplets no longer droplets. It rose upwards like steam sizzling off a hot pan. Black.

This time he stopped. Gabriel coughed again, the flecks steaming up in little black streaks of smoky dust before it even hit the ground. Black ichor began to drip from his teeth and neck, ringing his neck in a noose of shadow.

Jack swallowed slowly, the dry taste of rust on his lips as he took a step backwards.

Gabriel looked up once more, pain and fear in his eyes and Jack could see just how much effort it was taking him to hold back this tide, to keep some semblance of himself held still while he bled out.

Gabriel’s lips struggled to form a word as his hand clutching at the tide of shadow seeping from the wound no longer seemed able to hold it back. He stared up and met Jack’s eyes and whispered one ragged, wet word.

“Run.”

Gabriel’s body pulsed.

It was like a shiver that shook his very skin, became uncontained as the shadow tightened around his neck.

Jack involuntarily took a step back, his body taught as a bowstring and ready to flee despite how much he tried to will it forward again. He wanted to pull Gabriel into his arms, tell him it will be ok.

But he would be lying.

Every fibre of his being began screaming at him to heed Gabriel’s words as his body shook, the black shadow bursting forth for a moment before snapping back into his skin again.

Run. Run. Run. RUN!

Jack began backing up faster and faster—

Gabriel let out a desperate, painful scream just before his body collapsed in on itself and became pure black shadow, his clothes now empty in the snow.

And in his place, a beast rose up. Struggling, climbing out of its own black ichor. One massive clawed hand reached out and slammed into the ground striking furrows deep into the snow and stone, it reached forward and pulled a second arm out. Liquid shadow, it seemed to eat the dull light into its ever-changing surface as its head burst forth and roared.

Jack stared into its terrible maw, double-ringed with jagged black teeth and he turned and ran.

Jack was fast, but the shadow was faster. It leaped up and streamed through the air over him towards the pitched battle over the carts.

He barely had a second to take in the carnage—Daden lay in a puddle of spreading red, body pierced with arrows, Rake was swinging his massive battle axe around his head, blood spattered over his face as he roared. Five of the cloaked attackers lay unmoving. Lidia was on her knees clutching her stomach as blood spilled through her fingers and Jade had tears coursing down her face as she desperately tried to fend off three of the bandits even as she bled from multiple wounds. The rest of Holwood’s staff were either dead or dying and Holwood himself was nowhere to be seen.

The shadow landed, forming itself into a massive four-legged beast, supine panther-like form rippling with contained power as spines sprouted from its back all the way down to its narrow whipping tail. It reached out a claw and plucked the closest bandit off his now out-of-control panicking steed and swung him around and into the ground, cutting off the terrified scream.

The battle paused for a moment as all of the bandits and mercenaries turned as one to face the horrifying new threat.

It opened its mouth over the broken bandit on the ground and appeared to breathe in. As it did, the bandit’s skin began to turn grey, their bones collapsing until they eventually crumbled into dust. The shadow shivered then and seemed to become just a little bit more solid, spines hardening into shiny black horns and its body gaining just a little bit more definition.

It moved.

Horses, men, women all screamed as the shadow tore into them. It gave no thought for friend or foe, nothing of Gabriel left in its midst (for that, Jack was silently grateful), as it attacked. One bandit had his head crushed into the snow, body already disintegrating as soon as the black spines pierced him. Another took a swipe with her sword, swing going wide before she was kicked in the chest by its hind leg. Her body sailed through the air and into the canyon wall where it made a sickening crunch before crumpling at the base.

The last screamed as the jaws of the beast snapped them in half, blood spraying the snow and dripping from the shadow’s teeth, turning to dust before it hit the ground. With each life it took, the shadow became stronger. The uncontained shivers of its form lessened as it turned bodies to dust.

As the beast turned to face its next target Rake surged into action, striking down the closest bandit to him before leaping forward and bringing his axe down overhead.

“Run you fools!” Jack yelled. He knew he was too far away to help. Knew there was nothing he could do as Rake’s axe struck the shadow in the side, sinking in and spraying the already red snow with black ichor.

The beast roared and whipped its tail around and straight through Rake’s back, skewering him with a sickening crunch. His body began to crumble as the life was sucked from it. His skin became grey and withered, stretched over his skull until that too collapsed as the creature swung its tail around and Rake’s dust was carried away into the gathering storm.

Jade screamed as one of the remaining bandits swiped their sword through her defence and into her stomach. The shadow whipped its head around to face them, flowing over the ground towards the last living creatures on this narrow battlefield. At the same time, Jack leant low to the ground, plucked a sword out of a pile of dust and threw it with enough force that it sunk to the hilt into the chest of the one who had attacked Jade. They dropped to their knees as Jade swung around, taking care of the last two bandits just as the shadow loomed over her form and she put herself between it and Lidia.

Then Jack arrived.

He used his forward momentum to launch himself straight at the shadow’s head, fist connecting and sinking into the spongy shadow until it hit a hard, bony surface. The resounding CRACK echoed around the canyon and the beast was thrown off balance, stumbling a few steps to the side to shake its head vigorously.

Behind him, Jack felt Jade collapse in the snow just as Lidia began whispering in a language he didn’t understand. He couldn’t spare them any more attention however, as the beast suddenly vanished in a cloud of shadows and reformed behind him.

Jack didn’t even have time to turn around as the beast sunk its claws into his shoulder, piercing his skin and making him grunt in pain he hadn’t felt in years. Then, he was lifted off the ground as the beast spun him around and slammed him into the rocky canyon wall.

The breath was knocked out of him as he felt the sluggish leak of congealed blood seep from his already closing wounds. The beast let him go, thinking it was over.

It wasn’t over.

The second it released him out of its claws, Jack got his legs under himself, bent and launched off the wall, driving his shoulder into the ribs of the beast with enough force to throw it thirty feet away. Then he was up and running at it as it struggled to get to its feet, spines growing and jaw splitting open to roar at him.

The sound was like metal being ripped apart, swords clashing, and soldiers screaming in pain. Jack had heard it before. It was the sound of a battlefield. Of death.

“Come on,” he yelled as he faced it. “Do it!”

One part of him hoped it would. Hoped that this miserable excuse for an existence would be finally over. Hoped that he would be finally fee of the shame and the guilt and the loss that had consumed him for over a decade.

No such luck.

This ill-conceived body of his couldn’t die, and a beast that wore death as a cape of shadows didn’t stand a chance.

Jack drove himself forward and caught the shadow’s first swipe with one hand, gripped its spiny wrist with his other and brought it back the opposite way, enjoying the satisfying crunch of bones. He avoided the second swipe and managed to duck under its guard and kick upwards into its ribs. The beast grunted and tried to swing again but Jack just gave a humourless laugh as he danced around its graceless form, weaving in and out and delivering blows that made the shadows quiver with every hit.

The beast staggered to the side when he landed a particularly hard blow to its back leg and Jack took advantage by swinging himself up onto its neck and grabbing hold of one of its horns, the shiny black bone slick under his fingers. He pulled up and to the side, the beast screaming in pain as he ripped the horn from its head, black ichor spraying out of the open wound—

Jack’s legs were swiped out from under him. He felt himself falling, twisted in the air to try and recover but was unable to before a claw gripped his ankle and he was swung around and slammed into the ground. Its jaw clamped around his arm, teeth piercing his skin even as he tried to pry the jaws apart with his other hand. Its breath was hot, as if his arm was being baked on a bed of hot stones.

It turned its head the other way, trying to pull his arm off, and for a second he made eye contact with the beast. Red depths, flecked with gold, and burning with a hate, a rage—a suffering—that was not of this world—

Light blazed into the canyon from their left and as one, Jack and the beast glanced to its source.

Lidia kneeled in the snow, hunched over her wounds but holding a blazing white light in her hands. She cupped it as though it was water and as she slowly turned to face them, a smile curled on her face. She didn’t look angry, or cruel. Just ready. Serene in the face of her own death.

The beast’s eye narrowed.

NO—

Was the only thought Jack had before the beast flung him away with enough force that he was tumbling through the air.

Jack could fight a lot of things, but gravity and time were not part of his repertoire.

He felt his stomach drop as the beast spun itself into shadows and flowed up to reform itself above Lidia, jaws open wide and dripping with the remnants of Jack’s arm.

Jack folded his form into its other and beat his white wings against the storm winds. He desperately tried, each moment taking him closer but not enough.

He was never enough.

And he watched as the beast breathed in and Lidia began to crumple.

Watched as she looked it in the eye and smiled, lifting the light in her hands as if offering it to the shadows.

Watched as they seemed to burst apart for a moment, revealing Gabriel hanging in the air, naked and with his eyes closed.

Then the light flowed into him and disappeared altogether.

The white owl let out a piercing cry when she fell to dust and the shadows snapped back into place, the beast staggered for a moment as it confusedly looked at its kill.

Jack beat his wings for the last time and aimed down, a rage burning in the pit of his stomach—rage and guilt and loss and horror all warring between themselves. Then he released the owl form and fell; straight down, gathering speed as he dove into the shadows. Jack tore into it, not thinking, not feeling, just trying to get to Gabriel. He carved chunks out of its skin and bones, hands reaching out and not giving anything of himself up to the darkness as it thrashed in his grip.

His movements became more frantic as the shadow tried to close over the wounds until his ichor coated fingers finally found something solid and warm.

Gabriel, was the only thought Jack had before the shadows gathered together and skewered out into spikes, puncturing him shoulders to torso. But Jack wouldn’t give up, even as the shadows sunk out of him and reformed into the beast a couple of feet away. Its jaw was open and its breath melted the snow in front of it as it roared at Jack in frustration.

“You can’t kill what’s already dead!” Jack screamed as he leaped forward catching the beast by surprise. He reached into its mouth and grabbed a hold of the shadow’s tongue.

And pulled.

The shadow didn’t have time to react as its tongue was ripped out, black blood welling up and out of its teeth like waterfalls. Jack didn’t let go of the jaw, he pulled it down, slamming the monster to the ground and slamming his fist into its cheekbone.

“Give.”

“Him.”

“Back.”

On the last hit, he felt the hard structure underneath collapse, the wide red eye blinked at him once and then narrowed. Jack didn’t give an inch up and the beast let go a final defiant growl—as though it was trying to tell him this wasn’t over—before collapsing, the shadows coalescing like smoke, drifting for a moment on the cold wind before running backwards like a river, faster and faster, funnelling into Gabriel’s damaged broken mouth.

Then it was gone.

In its place, Gabriel lay unconscious and shivering in the red snow, no marks or damage on his body but a single light, a pinpoint of candle flame almost, hung over his forehead for just a moment before winking out.

Jack was left alone in a canyon of death.

Then he was on his knees in front of Gabriel, reaching out and about to touch him—

He paused, fingers—still coated in a heady mix of ichor and blood—inches away from Gabriel’s face. What if he woke the beast? Gabriel didn’t want to be touched, and Jack would wager that from the carnage around him and the distinct lack of some bodies, this was the reason why.

Gabriel shuddered again and Jack glanced around and up, frowning at the amount of snow that was being whipped about by the careless wind. The sky was darkening at an alarming rate. He muttered a curse under his breath and shrugged out of his ruined blood and ichor stained coat and began to wrap Gabriel in it as best he could—

Scraping. Behind him. Metal on wood.

Jack whipped his head around to the carts, searching for the source of the noise. There. A shadow moved slightly, barely visible in the fading light and thick snowfall.

He hastily wrapped the coat up and silently sprinted over to ready himself on the opposite side of the cart. The scraping came again, followed by a muffled curse which was abruptly cut off when Jack enclosed his hand around Lord Holwood’s throat and slammed him into the wooden side of the cart.

The man looked terrified and unharmed and was franticly trying to pry Jack’s fingers away from his neck.

Jack wasn’t surprised Holwood was a dirty coward. But he was surprised he had managed to make it through the carnage the beast had caused. Either way, Holwood had some explaining to do.

“What are you transporting?” Jack asked, his voice somehow foreign to his own ears. It sounded dead. Like cold steel. Surgical.

Holwood’s face was starting to go blue so he loosened his grip a little.

“How dare you—

Jack cut off the annoying little man again and kept squeezing until Holwood’s eyes looked as though they would burst from his head.

“Let’s try again. What are you transporting?”

This time Holwood just wheezed for a few breaths before croaking, “Alchemical ingredients.”

“And?”

There was a pause as Holwood seemed to consider not answering. Jack encouraged him with a little pressure on the windpipe.

“Necromantic potions. Deathblossom. Others.”

Jack sucked the icy air through his teeth. Shit. Shit.

“Who?” he spat the word at Holwood’s face and the man flinched and let out a whimper.

And kept his mouth closed.

Jack leaned in closer. “Who is your buyer?”

Another squeeze and—

“Talon! It was Talon. I received instructions and the order months ago, but the harvest was bad and the journey long and my staff were useless-urghhhh!” Jack cut off his annoying tirade.

“A name. Who is your buyer?”

“I don’t-I don’t know.” Holwood was sweating, perspiration coated his forehead despite the freezing cold wind.

Jack didn’t budge. “A name.”

“The witch! I don’t know her name! She claimed to be a doctor in her letters but never signed them and since they were offering such a large sum who was I to question her intentions?”

Jack’s stomach dropped like a lead brick.

“Right,” he said slowly. “Who attacked us?”

“How am I supposed to know?” Jack flexed his fingers and Holwood changed his tune. “Probably some rebel bandits!” He squeaked. “And good riddance to those bastards I say. They make everyone’s lives more difficult—

Jack slammed Holwood forcibly against the back of the cart. “Rebels? Rebels of what?”

Despite the considerable pain and discomfort Holwood was probably in he looked at Jack as though he was a simpleton.

Thankfully he also had the presence of mind to drop that expression and start talking the longer he made Jack wait. “The city. The North. Talon has controlled Gibraltar for years now. The Northern Kingdom fell when Overwatch did. The King hasn’t been seen in years and his daughter is missing. A permanent storm hangs over the city, penalty of death for anyone caught fraternizing with the enemy yadda yadda blah blah.” Holwood tried to wave his hands but slowly lowered them again when he saw Jack’s eyes narrow. “Everyone knows this.”

Jack closed his eyes for a moment. Don’t let it be true, he pleaded to himself, please, don’t let it be true. “It’s been a… while since I’ve been back. News to the South is rare and filled with rumour.”

He had been wandering for so long that he hadn’t dared look back to see what his failure had cost his people. He had been too ashamed. Too terrified at what he would discover if he ever returned from his self-imposed exile.

Yet somehow he found himself here, on the road to Gibraltar and with Gabriel.

Who was alive. Jack still marvelled at that.

Damaged, yes. But alive.

“You’re going to let me go, aren’t you?” Holwood was looking at him expectantly.

Jack blinked. “Why would I let you go?”

“I answered all your questions, gave you information.”

Jack slowly shook his head and gave the poor, little man a shallow smile. “This was never a negotiation. Your life was forfeit the second you said you were carrying necromancy.”

Beneath his fingers Holwood’s pace kicked up another notch and he began to struggle again. Jack just held him firmly, felt the low hunger that lived in his stomach turn into a burn as he leaned in, opened his mouth, bit down and ripped out Holwood’s throat.

The blood that flowed disgusted him and delighted him at once. Filling his veins with the fire of a much-needed meal.

He hated it.

Hated what had been made of him.

Holwood’s drained corpse hit the ground with a dull thud. Jack wiped his already-bloodied and ruined shirtsleeve across his mouth and walked over to one of the dead bandits.

She lay in the churned red snow with multiple axe wounds in her stomach. She was young, perhaps just twenty summers old. No one he recognised. Her clothes were worn thin and frayed in places and she wasn’t wearing furs against the cold. A grey cloak was still clasped around her neck. Jack leaned down and flicked it open, looking for what he knew must be sewn on the inside of the collar.

The embroidered symbol of Overwatch stared back at him.

Jack swallowed. He let the coat fall back and stared at his shaking hands, quivering with rage and disgust and shame and—

Jack let out a scream, swung his fist around and into the rocky earth beside him with a ginormous CRACK that echoed like thunder around the canyon. He clenched his fist against the pain, trying to feel it, every inch, even as the split skin healed over in seconds, even as the scars faded.

He breathed in.

He breathed out.

Jack looked around and adjusted himself to the situation.

Two of the horses that drew that carts were dead, the others were snorting and stamping their feet against the cold. Jack didn’t want to leave them, but there was little else he could do. The storm was whipping up something fierce and he had to find shelter or Gabriel was going to freeze.

Everything else was dead.

He needed a horse. Jack squinted behind him, eyes passing over a black blob down the path they had come that was just visible in the rapidly falling snow.

Midnight stomped her foot and snorted as he approached, clearly still jittery from the battle.

“Shh,” Jack put both hands out and approached her slowly. “Shh, I need your help,” he murmured. “Gabriel needs your help.”

Midnight snorted at him again. She clicked her teeth shut once in a threatening way, but turned to the side and let Jack take her bridle. The other rebels’ horses were nowhere to be found, but he figured if they survived the storm he’d be able to find them. There wasn’t anywhere else they could go but forwards or backwards along the pass.

He took the spare blankets from Gabriel’s saddlebags—raising his eyebrows a little at the hilt of a sword hidden under the bundle—and wrapped Gabriel’s body in them. He then gathered Gabriel’s clothes, some spare firewood from the carts, and hoisted himself and Gabriel into the saddle.

He gave a last glance at the battlefield, already dusted with an inch of snow and his heart broke.

Then he urged Midnight into a canter and left the carnage behind.

Chapter Text

Gabriel ran. He ran through the dark, wet halls that smelled like shit and piss, somehow able to see clearly despite the lack of sunlight or torches. His bare feet slapped the stone, the moaning and screaming and raucous laughter of the other prisoners as he hurtled past their cells went unheeded. He recognised these stone halls. Recognised the dungeon full of people he had helped put away for good. The lowest of the low. Murderers. Rapists. Necromancers. The kind of filth that should be left to rot until it expired.

Then…

Why was he here?

Why was he running?

He was running from something.

He was running towards something.

Faster and faster, he sprinted down and down and down, almost slipping on the slimy steps until he left the full cells behind and the only sound was his laboured breath as he pushed himself ever onward. He turned a corner and careened down a long hallway barred with a massive rusted heavy iron door at the end.

He braced himself for impact, palms out and ready, but instead he fell through it as if it were smoke and came stumbling to a stop in a massive round chamber.

Gabriel’s eyes widened as he took in the scene before him. The floor and walls were rough-cut stone, black and glistening in the candlelight. Painted on them were runic symbols, magic but nothing he recognised. It almost hurt to look at them and when he glanced away, unable to keep his eyes upon the wrongness anymore, he could not recall their shapes or meaning in any way. But they weren’t even the most horrific thing in this room.

Drawn on the floor was a circle. And slumped around it, at seven different points, were seven bodies, bound and gagged in bloodied armour. Even in the low light, he could see the blue, white and orange crest of Overwatch. Gabriel hesitantly walked into the circle, to where the last two figures were—one kneeling prostrated at the feet of the other. The standing figure was tall and narrow, her long fingers twirling in the air above the head of the kneeling figure whose face was covered in shifting shadows.

Gabriel could feel his heart hammering in his chest as he approached. He had a sick feeling of Déjà vu, a sense of familiarity he couldn’t remember experiencing, but somehow he knew he had been here before. As he looked down at the body it all clicked into place. The wounds that covered the chest, fresh and bloodied, were the same as his old scars.

At that very moment of realisation the last of the shadows were sucked from the figure’s face—his face—to coalesce into a tiny black pearl that came to rest in the witch’s palm.

She looked down at it for a moment, eyebrows furrowed as she studied it, before she curled her long, clawed fingers around it, making it vanish. With the same hand she tilted the kneeling Gabriel’s head up, his blank eyes reflecting nothing but the dull candle flame.

“Mmmm,” she crooned. “Can’t have you sharing now, can we? You’re far too tenacious to be left unchecked.”

She reached into her coat then, and brought out a delicately carved wooden box. The enamelled engravings caught the flickering light and Gabriel felt his stomach turn as he realised the box contained the same symbols as the surrounding walls. The witch paused a moment, almost with trepidation, before she flicked the latch and opened the box.

“Time to see what you can achieve with a proper host,” she whispered into the box.

And suddenly Gabriel realised that this was the moment.

He tried to move, to scream, to call out for help but found he was rooted to the spot.

He couldn’t move.

The inevitable was about to happen and he was forced to watch as the witch plucked a tiny glowing red sphere from the box, hissing out an incantation before forcing it down his throat. Then she took two quick steps back as one by one the candles began to go out.

The symbols on the floor and walls glowed with a sickly red hue as a dark smoke began to pour forth from Gabriel’s lips. Somehow it was worse now that he had to watch it happen to himself, his stomach turning as he clenched his ruined teeth.

Then the kneeling Gabriel’s eyes snapped open and he screamed. It lasted only a second before his mouth snapped shut, cutting off the inky black shadow that now swirled around the chamber.

His body convulsed. Gabriel watched himself slap his hand over his mouth as he pitched forward onto his hands and knees. He convulsed again and this time he coughed black ichor from between his fingers.

The third time was the last. His skin literally crawled before he was flung upright and the shadow broke free, tearing itself from his mouth and shattering his teeth and skin in the process. Blood sprayed in an arc before a black tongue lapped it from the air as it formed inside the jaws of the beast.

The witch slowly backed away muttering incantations under her breath until she was just outside the glowing circle of symbols.

The beast shook itself, spines forming on its back as Gabriel was lost inside the shadow.

It hurt to watch.

There was nothing he could do.

It’s a dream. It’s a dream, was all he could process.

But no. It wasn’t a dream.

It was a memory.

His first.

The beast roared at the witch and leaped at her, jaws open and ready to devour only to be thwarted by the red symbols that pulsed for just a second but which forced it to come to a juddering halt.

The beast snarled at the witch.

“Now now, don’t be like that,” she murmured as she appeared to study it. She began to walk around the outside of the circle it was bound in, observing it from all angles until she was back where she began. “Beautiful,” she breathed.

Then she snapped out harsh words, an incantation or a binding, or something that made the beast tilt its head and look her in the eye.

She nodded once and the beast seemed to acknowledge it by licking its teeth and snapping them shut.

The witch bowed to it and at the same time gestured to the door which swung open with barely a creak.

The shadow took one last look at her before it surged forward and was gone.

That was when the witch smiled, face splitting apart all the way up to her high, thin cheekbones.

“Run my little Reaper. Let’s see what havoc you may wreak.”

And Gabriel couldn’t stand it anymore. He ran too.

Back out the door and through the dank dark hallways, up the stairs and past the prison cells—every one of them deathly silent now.

He was almost there, he could feel it.

Freedom. The sky.

He flung open the last door and began to climb the final few stairs knowing that it was barely inches away from him.

Only for his reaching hand to be plunged into shadow.

The beast smiled and opened its dripping maw wide, inviting him in, inviting him to try and defy it.

Gabriel didn’t think twice. He plunged into the shadow, felt it tear at him, cut him, consume him. Strip him down to his aching bones.

…and yet he still found himself reaching.

He wanted to see that blue again.

Only this time it wasn’t the sky, it was Jack’s eyes. Kind eyes looking out of a perfect face and asking him to take that final step out—

“Gabriel! Wake up!”

He felt a hand on his shoulder and as his eyes shot open there was that blue. Deep, and vast and achingly right in front of him. They were frowning with concern and sadness and maybe just a little pity.

The memory of what had happened before the dream hit him like a charging bull.

“Get away from me!” Gabriel hissed as he tried to scrabble backwards from Jack, terrified that the monster would consume him but also madly trying to figure out how he had survived and where he was and why it was so fucking cold—

Jack withdrew his arm and held up his hands in front of himself, palms facing outwards. He backed off slowly before he crouched behind a smouldering pit of coals that gave off a dull head that wasn’t enough to stave off the cold that was biting deep into Gabriel’s bones.

That was when he realised that—except for a blanket—he was naked.

He was in a small, tight cave, the roof barely four feet high. A freezing draught was coming from behind the rocks at Jack’s back and he could hear the wind screaming beyond.

They were alone.

“What happened?” he croaked. Knowing the answer. Dreading hearing it. Then, as an afterthought he added, “how are you alive?”

Jack licked his lips. “I’m ‘alive’ precisely because I’m not. Cursed with vampirism and all that.”

If Jack was meant to be joking, he was doing a poor job at it. But no, Jack’s stony face told no lie.

Gabriel hugged his blanket closer and shivered. He looked down at his ungloved hands still within his skin and for the first time he realised there was no hunger. The beast was sated. Then he realised what that meant. His mouth was suddenly dry as he whispered, “how many?”

“Gabriel—

“How. Many.”

Jack was silent for a long time. “All of them. The mercenaries were dead by the time you entered the fray. You killed the rest of the raiders,”—Jack’s mouth twisted,—“and I killed Holwood. Talon-turncoat, craven asshole that he was.”

Despite himself, Gabriel sighed in relief. He hadn’t killed them. Jade and Lidia and Rake and Daden. He hadn’t killed them. Then he felt the guilt at that thought, and the grief that they were gone. But… thank the gods he hadn’t been the one to do it.

He remembered the unbearable amount of pain that came from being shot in the throat. He remembered struggling in the snow, telling Jack to run. Then—

Nothing.

Except…maybe there was a flash of light. He didn’t know when, or how. But he remembers something. A silhouette. Small, female. Was it Lidia? Reaching out to him, giving him something.

He ran a hand down his face, eyes closed, and sighed. The beast slumbered in his stomach, a warm coal of contented power. Under control—for now.

“Holwood was transporting necromantic potions and other alchemical supplies.” Jack had moved closer again. “The kind of stuff that was outlawed long ago because of the horrors it can create.”

Gabriel tugged the blanket around him and looked into the fire. “So?”

“So Talon is planning something. They’re making their move. They already hold sway over the King, maybe this might be the moment they reveal—

“It doesn’t matter,” Gabriel cut him off. None of this mattered. They were all dead now. The contract was over and if he was lucky, maybe he could scavenge a bit of coin from the bodies of whoever the raiders were.

When he looked back up at Jack, he found the man was close and Gabriel instinctually leaned back an inch. Jack looked like he wanted to say something more but in the end held his silence and continued to stare at him. It made Gabriel feel like he was being read, pages torn wide open, by this man he barely knew.

Slowly, without looking away, Jack lifted his hand up. Gabriel could feel his heart beat faster with every breath he took as Jack’s hand reached towards his face. He snapped his hands up and held Jack’s wrist, taking care not to touch the skin of his hand. The hand stopped, poised next to his cheek.

“Don’t touch me,” he said through his broken teeth, more aware now than ever that he couldn’t hide from this. Couldn’t hide what he was from the man sitting across from him.

Jack stared back at him. Uncompromising blue eyes hard as ice but just as brittle—poised to shatter. He didn’t move, his hand still inches from Gabriel’s face.

And suddenly it took all of Gabriel’s will not to lean into it. Not to pull Jack in close and give in to the first human-vampire-whatever Jack was to want to even try to touch him. But at the same time the bile rose in his throat at that thought, his grip loosening around Jack’s arm until he was the one being supported.

Still Jack did not move.

“Why?” Jack uttered the single word softly but it broke him into a million pieces.

He looked away and didn’t even care that his loneliness was written all over his face. “You’ll die.”

“I’m here now.”

“And how is that?”

Jack was quiet. “You can’t kill what’s already dead,” he murmured eventually.

Gabriel clenched his teeth and wished for the safety of his scarf and hood. He wanted to retreat somewhere so he could figure out this puzzle of a man before him. Jack Morrison—Overwatch’s eponymous leader who had died defeated on the battlefield and had then been turned into a creature from a nightmare. Jack Morrison—shining beacon of hope against the darkness, now reduced to spending the night in a cave with a broken man who could barely hold back the monster inside.

Jack Morrison—who had survived the beast that slumbered beneath his skin and who had saved him from retreating into that self once more.

And still… he couldn’t. He couldn’t bear the thought of losing another. Of losing Jack. Who he had only just met but who knew him—him, Gabriel—more than anyone he had crossed paths with in the past ten years. He couldn’t do it. Even if Jack had survived, somehow, miraculously, Gabriel didn’t want to take the chance.

He felt it then, the tingly nervousness that rose in his chest; that hovered over the skin where Jack’s hand was poised. It was in the way the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end and in the way his mouth had suddenly gone dry at the possibility that Jack presented.

But he couldn’t.

So he shook his head and tried to convey all these new feelings through his refusal to lose something he had just found.

“Gabriel, it’s ok.” Jack’s voice was soft but there was a jagged edge to it, as if he had tried to mend it but didn’t quite have all the pieces.

“It’s really not,” he choked out.

“Why?”

“Because I’m a monster.”

“You’re not a monster—

“You don’t get to tell me what I am and am not,” he hissed. It sounded harsher than he intended and Jack glanced away for a second, something akin to shame crossing his face like a shadow.

“Perhaps,” he murmured. “But perhaps it doesn’t matter. We are what we make of ourselves.”

“And what if I didn’t make myself?” he asked bitterly. He still didn’t know who he was. What he was. Why he was even here or what lay beneath his own skin. He was nothing but a shell. He didn’t…

He didn’t deserve this.

Monsters who turned people into husks drained of life didn’t deserve to be touched.

He was unworthy.

Jack dropped his hand and leaned back, eyes narrowing. “Who are you Gabriel?”

“Why don’t you tell me that since you’re the expert?”

“No. Who are you. Right now.”

“You know who I am—

“I know who Gabe used to be.” Jack cut him off with a whip crack of words. “I know what he was like, what he loved and lost and fought for. I remember him, and the man he was. I knew a lot of him. Not all, only what he gave me. But he gave me what he could.”

Jack took a deep breath. “You though. I don’t know anything about you. So, if you want to call yourself a monster, then go ahead. But I refuse to believe that the monster is all of you. So. Tell me who you are, Gabriel.”

Gabriel swallowed. The deep-blue sky that he reached towards at the end of each night sat across from him and asked to know him. But how can you tell someone you don’t know yourself? That you run from any kind of questions because it’s too shameful to try and confront yourself. Too painful to try and examine because the second you realise that you are an empty void, it’s far too easy to begin to fall.

He shuddered and pulled the blankets closer and chose to look into the fire instead and see whether any of the answers he wanted were hidden inside the ever-changing flames instead.

Eventually he whispered, “I don’t know.”

Jack was silent then. For a long time, they both just sat staring into the flames while a snowstorm raged outside.

“Gabriel, can you tell me what happened to you?” The question was gentle, delivered like Jack was holding out a delicate flower, an offering to him.

It was tempting. He could refuse it, but more and more, he found himself drawn to the man across the fire. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to give some of himself up to another. Release the bundle of horror and guilt he had been carrying for so long. Jack had already seen the worst of him and had still chosen to save him from it.

So, he took a deep breath, and began to tell his story.

The dungeon had been cold and wet and miserable. He remembers that much at least. He tells Jack of the witch and her foul magic, of the beast she put inside him…

Jack looked visibly horrified and furious when he described the witch but he didn’t interrupt. Just closed his eyes for as long as Gabriel took to tell of those first few moments that formed his early memories.

He hesitates as he thinks back to the dream he awoke from. Whatever she had stolen from him, sequestered away. Were they his memories? His soul? He finds the words on the tip of his tongue but he swallows them again. He was who he was now. Whoever came before was someone different. The soft caress of the name “Gabe” was not his to keep nor did he want the responsibility that came with it.

Jack’s head tilts to the side at his hesitation, silently asking the question. Gabriel continues on without acknowledging it.

Those first few months are nothing but a blur. He had wandered, starving and alone through mountains and forests, leaving desiccated corpses behind him. He remembered walking into a village, someone trying to reach out a hand to him, offering help. Then the screams. He had woken up warm—mind clear for the first time in a long time until he discovered the body of a child next to him, drained of life. There were three other corpses in that house. That had been when he realised. He stole clothes and food from the empty houses and a horse from the stables and he had run.

Spent the next two seasons trying to live in the forest, but the hunger would not be sated by the occasional squirrel or deer corpse. And when he lost control the second time, he had woken up under the watchful eye of an alchemist. She was a hermit, living in the woods and off the land. Had a pet hawk and a long bow and was a strange mix of sarcastic humour and mothering tendencies. Told him that she couldn’t fix him, couldn’t fix what was missing, or what was now inside, but she could teach him how to control its hunger. She had looked truly sorry when she revealed that he would still need to sate it.

He spent four months with her until it became too much. He had said goodbye and left to try and build a life out of this ruinous body he had inherited. He had tried. Most of it was spent living as a mercenary finding what work he could. He had discovered he was quite adept at issuing orders and wielding a sword.

He put down a rebellion in one of the warring Southern Kingdoms. Killed a cruel Baron for an uprising of commoners in the Midland Fiefdoms. Took a couple of assassin contracts, one of which he ended up turning on his employer for because she was just the worst and he’d only realised this after accidentally meeting the target who was taking her family out to the same local theatre production he’d also decided to take the night off to see. He got so desperate for coin at one point he took a labour job on a ship but realised before they’d even left the harbour that it wasn’t going to work out because all he could do was vomit over the side. Only it was too late to leave so he spent the next two weeks being thoroughly miserable on a ship full of good looking men he couldn’t touch (good thing too, because he probably would have barfed all over them). He’d crossed the desert to the East and back again. Lived for a while in a village by a lake where he didn’t speak a word of their language but picked it up quite quickly.

But always. Always the hunger followed him. He couldn’t escape it, and so he ran from it. And when he could run no longer, he killed for it.

Until he had found something he couldn’t kill.

“What are you?” He asked Jack the question again

Jack shrugged. “Something that shouldn’t exist. An abomination. An evil thing.”

That makes two of us, Gabriel thought. “That’s not an answer,” he said aloud.

“Vampire would probably most accurately describe me then.”

He could tell Jack was trying not to bite of the words and how hard it was for him to not appear bitter. His body had gone still and Gabriel was pretty sure he was the only thing breathing in this cave.

“Guess we’re both monsters then,” he eventually muttered. It’s a goddamn fairytale in here.

Jack moved closer to him then. Around the fire, until he was sitting just across from him. There was something in his eyes, the firelight flickering across blue ice. “Why did you never come back?”

Gabriel blinked and frowned at him.

“Because there was nothing for me here.” Why would he run towards whatever had put this monster inside him? Why would he come back to a place of pain? Why would he ever want to remember the trauma that had led up to that moment?

Jack closed his eyes, then. When he opened them again, Gabriel was taken aback by the naked longing that raged within, as if Jack was opening himself up, breaking down, inviting him to look on his deepest self.

“That’s not true,” Jack whispered. He moved forward again, carefully bringing himself up and over Gabriel. He brought a hand up to Gabriel’s face again, hovering there. Waiting. Each slow movement was deliberate, as though he was trying to make Gabriel understand that he shouldn’t be afraid.

Gabriel very much was. He swallowed and tried to quell his beating heart as Jack’s endless blue eyes took up the whole of his vision. His sky was here.

“How long has it been?” Jack whispered. “How long since you’ve been held, or touched, or kissed?”

“I-I don’t. I don’t know,” he stammered as his heart sped up and his stomach clenched at the thought. “I haven’t. I can’t.” The last word was strangled in his throat. Suddenly, more than anything, he wished for his memories back. Wished that he could’ve made his own in the past decade—

“Gabriel,” Jack said his name so softly, like a caress all of its own. “Let me touch you.”

He closed his eyes and sighed his ten years out before him. But what if you’re wrong? He didn’t know Jack. He didn’t pretend to know him. But now, it felt as if a fire had been lit inside his chest. He wanted to know. He wanted to pick him apart and examine the pieces and try and figure out why he would ever want to be with a monster?

He wanted to stay with Jack.

He wanted Jack to stay.

The darkness inside the pit of his stomach shifted in its contented, well-fed slumber. For a second, he worried that it would wake, but it seemed to breathe out, unconcerned about the potential meal in front of it.

“Gabriel.”

He didn’t look at Jack. He clutched the blanket around him and shivered at the thought of what could go wrong. What he could lose.

But also at the possibility.

The tiniest bit of hope that Jack was offering in his outstretched palm.

He gave into it.

Gabriel leaned forward and turned his head slightly, letting Jack interpret that as he willed.

The first cool fingertip on his cheek sent lightning through his veins and he flicked his eyes back to Jack, expecting him to be a husk, drained of life in the next six seconds.

Instead, he found himself captivated in his eyes, the blue leading him on until he was falling into it, drowning, reaching up and clasping Jack’s hand to his face like a life raft.

He hadn’t fallen into a void. Hadn’t been dragged under by the darkness. He was floating, drifting on an endless sea and Jack was there guiding the way. Very much alive and holding onto him as if he was all that mattered in the world.

His breathing became ragged as Jack cupped his hand around his cheek. It was cool to touch. Smooth, like his skin was made of porcelain. Gabriel brushed his own fingers over Jack’s hand in confusion, in awe at the textile, very real sensation of touch.

It was joyous. To be able to touch someone.

He let out a shaky breath, unable to contain the sob that rose up in his throat, and clutched the hand even closer suddenly terrified that it might disappear.

Then Jack leaned in and kissed him. It was sudden and shocking and exactly what he wanted. Eyes closed, Gabriel was caught up in the sudden electrified current that travelled through his body. The first brush of Jack’s lips was hesitant, testing the waters. But Gabriel had long since begun to drown. His other hand found Jack’s neck and crushed him in, fingers curling in that smooth white hair.

Jack took that as confirmation and just like that their bodies were flush against each other, Jack’s on top of his.

The first dip of Jack’s tongue into his ruined mouth surprised him. It licked across his teeth and tangled with his own. Jack seemed not to care for the scarred lips of his, or the sharp teeth. He bit down on Gabriel’s lower lip, nipping it before pulling back and finally letting Gabriel breathe.

His eyes were wide and blood roared in his ears and all he could think about was how he wanted more of that longing and devouring and to lose himself in the endless depths of these sensations.

Jack obliged. He leaned back in, his fingers finding Gabriel’s hair and brushing through it, feeling the scars on his face, clawing down his back and pushing him down. Jack explored his mouth with his own and Gabriel relished in the cool, softness of Jack’s lips.

The blanket had fallen off and it took Jack’s practiced lips to begin a journey down his neck before he realised just how hard he was and how naked he was and how he could feel Jack’s own cock straining against his pants as they lay flush against each other. And how Jack definitely knew these facts because when Gabriel froze underneath him Jack raised an eyebrow, question smouldering in his eyes. It was all Gabriel could do to nod slowly and keep the shiver contained.

He couldn’t keep the moan from escaping his lips however, as one of Jack’s hands found his cock and gave it a stroke. It was just a tease, though. His lips were slowly moving down Gabriel’s chest, pausing to suck at his nipple, tongue flicking across it until it was hard with arousal and Gabriel’s mind was nothing but white noise.

And still Jack went lower. Across his scarred abdomen, tracing the lines of injuries he doesn’t remember, fingers following after like cold lightning. Right down to the base of his cock. He could feel Jack’s lips curling upward against his skin, smiling into it. Then Jack’s tongue licked from the base up until it swiped across the slit, taking in the precum leaking out and almost making Gabriel let go then and there.

He was almost too scared to look, but when he finally cracked an eye open and looked down, it appeared that was what Jack was waiting for. The fire of mischief and arousal reflected up at him were abruptly cut off when Jack pushed his lips over Gabriel’s cock and took his entire length in until he felt himself hit the back of Jack’s throat.

It was almost too much and he threw back his head as Jack came up again, practiced tongue darting out along his length, kissing the head, circling his slit. He needed more. One of Gabriel’s hands found the back of Jack’s head and pushed him down again, the muffled ‘mnf’ of surprise supressed when he slid to the warmth at the back of Jack’s throat again and held him there as he came. Threads of cum spilling into Jack’s mouth as Gabriel was overcome by the orgasm that shook his entire body.

Jack eventually came back up, cool tongue darting back over his cock, cleaning up after himself.

Gabriel was breathing hard, eyes wide and looking down at Jack as he lazily wiped a bit of spilled cum from his mouth, sucking it off his delicate finger while looking into his eyes.

His hands found Jack’s cool cheeks, guiding him forward and up and to his lips once more, tasting the shadow of himself that Jack had already swallowed. Jack was slower this time. Making sure he felt every impression of his lips and hands as they traced his body.

Jack kissed along his neck, each brush of his lips leaving a cold fire burning behind. The sensation was like ecstasy, leaving Gabriel begging for more.

“Hmmm,” Jack whispered into his skin. “I like it when you beg, Gabe.”

Gabriel’s eyes snapped open and he sat up. Just like that, desire and arousal gone. Burned up in another growing feeling of realisation and anger. How could he have been such a fool as to believe this was for him?

Jack looked up like a startled rabbit. “What—

He pushed Jack’s chest off him, used all his strength, but for a second Jack didn’t budge. Until he decided to, and moved back quickly, brows furrowed.

Gabriel picked up the blanket and backed off to the other side of the fire. “Was it me?” he hissed. “Or did you just want to touch him again?” His voice rose until he was shouting.

Jack looks horrified. “No, Gabriel. That’s not what I—

“Don’t touch me again.”

Jack looked away, then nodded once and suddenly Gabriel was alone again. The fire crackled as a log broke up into the coals in the silence left behind.

Chapter Text

The cave was lonely without Jack. Gabriel drew his legs up and stared into the dying flames of the fire. He tried not to think about what had just happened. The sensation of Jack’s cold fingertips over his ruined body. The feeling of his lips brushing against his neck. The way his mouth closed over—

It wasn’t for him though. Gabriel scrubbed a hand down his face. Of course it wasn’t for him. How could Jack be so tender, so knowing with a man he’d just met? It made him wonder what kind of person Gabe had been to deserve him. He could almost feel it, a phantom touch, just out of reach. Something solid filling this empty void within him. Would he understand if he regained the memories he’d lost? Would that be worth the price of losing himself in the process?

Gabriel sighed. He looked around the little cave and found a small pile of items on the other side of the fire. His clothes, folded neatly, a waterskin and food. After putting on the rest of his attire and feeling much warmer for it, he paused at the scarf. Black and tattered, his fingers bunched it in his grasp. His jaw tightened as he thought about putting it back on. Hiding himself away again. In the end he curled it around his neck but didn’t raise it any further.

He went to investigate the entrance to the cave, barely a crack in the wall big enough to let him pass. Jack must have done some manoeuvring to get his unconscious body through there. It was piled high with compacted snow. Gabriel dug out a little at the top and was rewarded by an icy blast of frigid air in his face. So the blizzard wasn’t over yet.

He swallowed as he finally remembered Midnight and guiltily prayed he hadn’t killed her too. And if he hadn’t, then he hoped that Jack had managed to find her shelter. He sighed and went back to sit over by the fire and thought about what he wanted to do.

Jack clearly wanted him to go North, back to Gibraltar. But did he only want that so he could force Gabriel to confront who he used to be? He had poured his entire story out to his blue sky and had been rewarded with the knowledge that Jack still didn’t recognise him.

And that really sealed the deal right there. What was the point of him going back? He wasn’t some altruistic do-gooder and he sure as hell wasn’t interested in erasing his entire decade of existence to become the man that got stuck with a necrotic monster inside his body.

A brief thought flickered to life in his mind: he wondered if Jack would come South with him if he asked. He had a feeling he would. But did he really want to try and make a man who clearly loved someone else love him instead?

He quenched the flame of desire in his heart and lay down on the cold stone.

Jack watched Gabriel open his eyes and slowly sit up. Saw the wince as he stretched and heard the click of bones before he realised he wasn’t alone. Jack was as far as he could physically get away from the other man, yet even so, Gabriel flinched back.

He tried not to let how much that hurt show on his face. “Blizzard is over,” he said quietly and got up to leave the cave.

Gabriel didn’t say anything but followed him outside to where he’d gathered the horses and one of Holwood’s carts. The other lay at the bottom of the ravine, the horrid smoke from the smashed contents had been blown away by the last of the Blizzard wind. Luckily the sky was still heavy with clouds so Jack hadn’t had to cover himself up. His coat and hat had been ruined in the battle and he didn’t exactly feel right about putting them back on in any case.

He’d made up his mind. No more pretending.

Midnight snorted Gabriel’s hair back as he pulled on a pair of gloves and checked her over, muttering an apology as he patted her neck.

“Gibraltar is three days away,” Jack began. Gabriel’s hands paused and he tilted his head, not looking at Jack. “We should be able to get through the gates with enough of a bribe and the mention of what we’re carrying. Shouldn’t be too hard to go undercover on account of us both being dead—

“I’m not going,” Gabriel cut him off.

Jack frowned. “What?”

“I’m not going.”

He knew his confusion was showing on his face. But really? After all that, he wasn’t going to finish what he started? “Why not?”

“Because it’s not my fight,” Gabriel said slowly. “I don’t give a shit about Talon, or Gibraltar. As far as I’m concerned everyone is better off without me coming to town.”

“Gabriel,” there was a warning in his tone. A rising frustration at his utter stubbornness. “They need us.”

“So go help them,” Gabriel snarled. “I’m not coming.”

He turned his back on him and began to walk away when Jack finally snapped. “You selfish bastard,” he muttered at Gabriel’s back.

He turned on Jack. “You do not get to judge me!” he shouted.

“I do when you’re being pathetic.” Jack shouted back. “This, this isn’t you. You’re not a coward, Gabriel.”

Gabriel’s face darkened. “Don’t you dare compare me to him. I am not that man anymore and I don’t care if you loved him but you need to remember that he does not belong to you.”

Jack felt the words impact, his mouth twisting. But he raised his chin and looked down on Gabriel, shoving his shame to the side and letting his anger take over.

“No,” said Jack. “You are not him. Which begs the question, what kind of man do you want to be Gabriel?”

“The kind who doesn’t poke his nose into other people’s business when they have done nothing for him and he for them. I’d like to keep it that way.”

That felt like a knife twisting in his stomach and Jack finally tasted the words on the tip of his tongue. Words he had promised not to reveal unless asked. Words that he hoped would finally make Gabriel understand.

Thinking the conversation was finished, however, Gabriel began to turn away.

And seeing him ready to leave. Ready to leave him. Jack said, “You died a hero.”

He didn’t expect Gabriel’s hand to shoot out and wrap around his throat. He could tell the strength he was exerting would be cutting off his air supply had air mattered to him at all. Jack looked into his eyes.

“You died a hero, Gabriel.” Slowly, he reached up and pulled Gabriel’s hand away from his neck, his cursed strength easily prising Gabriel’s fingers away from his throat. “You died protecting the people of Gibraltar.”

“Don’t.” Gabriel clenched his ruined teeth, but Jack didn’t stop.

He held Gabriel’s wrist and forced him back a step. “You need to figure out who you really are. You can keep running Gabriel. It’s not going to save you from the truth.”

“Oh, and I suppose you know what that is?”

Something about the way he said it made Jack pause and frown. Gabriel didn’t remember anything from more than a decade ago, but Jack had caught himself wondering how that could possibly be true. Surely there must be something of him left. He hadn’t really considered just how deep Gabriel’s fear of the past went. His entire history, erased.

And that silenced him.

Gabriel gave him a contemptuous look and turned around again. “Thought not.”

“You really have no idea, do you?” Jack said softly.

Gabriel stopped in his tracks, broad back hunched over. Then his head tilted ever so slightly to the side, listening.

“If you did, then maybe you would know what you mean to people.” What you mean to me. Jack didn’t say it, but he thought he saw the way the words hit him.

He watched Gabriel balance on that knife edge and all at once collapse as he whirled around and yelled, “Who am I supposed to be, then? What’s the big truth, Jack? Tell me what I’m so afraid of.”

Gabriel’s eyes were hard, but brittle. He was breathing hard and stood as if braced for an attack. And suddenly Jack realised this wasn’t how he wanted this to go. But it was the way it was going and if he broke the man with the truth then that’s what he was prepared to do.

Jack hardened his heart and took a step forward. “You are Lord Gabriel Reyes.”

He watched Gabriel’s eyes widen at the name, taking a step back.

“You were the youngest Lord ever to be knighted into the King’s Guard.” Another step forward mirrored by Gabriel’s step back. “Then the world fell apart. The old gods were raised and our lands scoured.”

Jack took another step forward, refused to let Gabriel look away even as he backed up further. “You trained me and countless others who joined the fight. Rallied the living against the dead. Commanded the King’s armies before you were even thirty.”

“You were a hero, Gabriel. But this was only just the beginning. This wasn’t a battle we could win off the backs of farmers and other untrained soldiers willing to give the only thing they had left. We were going to lose. Maybe we could hold back the tide of the dead for a year or two, but we were fighting gods. So the King’s alchemists came up with a solution.” Jack paused, unwilling to relive the trauma of his own sacrifice in that moment. “The thing about fighting gods…well, to fight gods, we had to become them. And it cost us dearly.”

Another step. “Your home burned while we tried what we could. Your mother and father died as the City of Angels was overrun by the dead. Your sister—you have a sister, Gabriel—escaped. She was still alive last I checked and I know she still fights against Talon.”

Another step. “Ridiculously outnumbered and outclassed, you destroyed the necromancer Tal Rasha’s army during the first uprising.” And I fought for you. With you.

“And when the bastards opened up the portal and the rest of the old gods finally flooded the earth and brought the armies of the dead with them, we faced them. We fought them. We won.”

We broke ourselves on the backs of these gods. Impossible monsters revived only to make humanity suffer. And suffer we did, but we paid them back in kind.

Gabriel was backed up against the wall of the canyon now. Jack stopped two feet from him. Watched the way his jaw trembled and eyes looked for a way out. He could tell it took all of Gabriel’s courage to look him in the eye.

“What happened next?”

And now it was Jack’s turn for his courage to abandon him. It took everything he had not to look away.

“I failed you,” he whispered. “I led you to your death.”

The silence was deafening. He’d finally revealed what Gabe would have known all along. Well, if there was ever any chance of Gabriel coming to Gibraltar he had just sent that off with the wind.

Finally, Gabriel took a breath. “How?”

Jack turned away, unable to endure that shattered look any more. “Fifteen years of war, Gabriel.” His voice was barely his own, a gravely whisper. “We found what happiness we could during it, but it was hard. And when we thought it was over, it turned out it wasn’t.”

He still remembered it. That moment when they had the last of the God Necromancers cornered, running through the Zurich Pass. Gabe had been tracking them for weeks with his elite team, leaving the command of the army to him. They were tired, it had been a long war, half his life filled with loss and pain. But he had a feeling something was wrong. It was in the way Gabe had become paranoid, withholding information, and the way some of his soldiers looked at him. In the way their losses were more horrific now than during the beginning of the war. Soldiers captured. Mages and magic twisted. Bodies mutilated and risen again. In the way his and Gabe’s power to keep the dead they killed down didn’t seem to be working quite right anymore. There was something else going on under the surface, but he had been too short-sighted to see it.

All he could think about was that this could be the end. This could be the moment they destroyed the last god. Then maybe they could rest.

He’d received the message from Gabriel that morning. Something’s wrong, do not engage. But they had the necromancer cornered. They had him. He barely had any of his corpse soldiers left. And Jack had the might of an army behind him. Overwatch was still strong.

So he’d led the charge.

Shattered his army in a valley of the dead.

Should have realised that the Zurich Pass was named after an ancient city that had once stood in the valley. Should have realised that an old God in a necromancer’s body was not going to go quietly into death.

Should have realised that his own army was going to turn against him.

Should have trusted the man he loved.

The bloodbath was unimaginable. And at the end—because he knew this was the end—he had lain on the battlefield, bleeding out. He tried to crawl and find Gabe. See his face one last time.

He remembered red. Blood dripping into his eyes from a wound that miraculously hadn’t killed him—the alchemists had done their work well. He remembered rough hands under his arms. Being dragged to the centre of it all, over the bodies of his own soldiers.

In and out of consciousness he tried to hold himself above the pain and horror. Until he was made to look up, long fingernails dragging his chin up, cutting his neck as he was forced to look the witch in the eye. He knew her, she’d worked on making them able to withstand the shadow magic.

She had smiled down coldly at him. Taken his sword, the holy relic from a past era when the gods had truly walked the earth. Watched as she handed it to an enormous figure whose right hand curled with shadows. He had appraised the blade, ran a finger across its length and where his blood dripped onto the blade, shadows curled, blackening it until the blade ate the light instead of reflecting it. A black abyss.

Then the man had stepped aside and revealed Gabe, kneeling. He was wounded, barely conscious and held up by two animated corpses.

The man hadn’t even looked at Jack. Instead, he turned and plunged it through Gabe’s chest.

A swift execution.

Jack had watched as the life left his eyes.

He remembered screaming, a burst of inhuman strength pulling the soldiers holding him forward. He crushed them with his bare hands trying to reach Gabe, trying to do something, anything. Until the man with the shadow hand had closed it around his neck, lifting him up.

Jack struggled, clawing at the shadows as he struggled to breathe. The man paid him no mind, instead turning to the side and asking in an offhand, deep tone, “You have plans for this one?”

He remembered a cold fingertip tracing the scar down his face, an accented yet emotionless voice said, “Oh, I have many plans for this one.” He knew that voice.

The alchemist had laughed then, “Don’t play with your food, Amelie.”

He’d found out that he’d been in the dungeon for two years when he finally escaped. He didn’t remember much of it. By then, the Kingdom had all but fallen into Talon’s hands and Jack had run. Run from himself and what he had become. Run from his failures. He had run from his guilt.

Gabriel was silent as Jack finished, his face unreadable.

Finally, he said quietly, “You watched me die?”

“I did.”

“He’s gone, Jack. I don’t know what you think I could possibly do about any of this.”

Jack took a deep, shaky breath—cold air in a hollow chest. “Something, anything. We can help and that’s what matters. Gabriel, you’ve been helping people for ten years—

“I got paid for that,” Gabriel cuts him off.

“Then maybe it’s time to pay the people who made you what you are back. Please, Gabriel, I can’t let you walk away from this.”

“Try and stop me,” Gabriel said and heaved himself into Midnight’s saddle. He turned the mare around and kicked her sides only to have her stand stock still, digging her hooves in as she stared ahead. She snorted a breath into the frigid air and Jack and Gabriel suddenly realised they weren’t as alone as they had thought.

A figure stood in the centre of the path. Short, a tattered grey coat with blue accents and a large hood covered their face in shadow. Leaning on an elegant longbow with incredibly intricate carving in its polished wood, they shifted it to the other hand and pulled off the hood revealing a face that Jack had long since buried in his memory.

Ana’s hair was white, poking out from underneath a brilliant blue headscarf. She smiled wryly, laugh-lines crinkling in her one good eye, the other covered with an eyepatch.

“Jack,” she said, her voice was older but still much the same as he remembered her. “I see you managed to age the best out of all of us. Gabriel, it’s been a while.”

Jack stared at her. She was a ghost. She had to be. There was no way she could still be alive. They had lost her in the months before Zurich. He had mourned her. He flicked his eyes up at Gabriel and saw the recognition in his eyes and his heart leapt for a moment before he realised it was a different sort of recognition to what he was experiencing. Gabriel actually smiled at her before a tiny frown appeared as he realised what she had said. He glanced back at Jack, with a question in his eyes.

He was entirely unsuspecting then, when a heavy bag of coin sailed through the air to smack him straight in the face and knock him off Midnight’s back. He flailed for a moment before Jack stepped forward and easily caught him before he hit the snow. Jack stared into Gabriel’s wide, hopelessly confused, brown eyes before he remembered that he was meant to be angry and unceremoniously dumped him the rest of the way on the ground. Gabriel let out a little ‘oof’ as he landed right next to a couple of glinting gold coins. If the size of the bag was anything to go off, Jack estimated that it probably held enough to buy a small keep.

“You want gold, Gabriel? I’ll pay you.” Ana’s boots crunched over the shallow snow.

Jack stared at her as she walked over to stand before them. Despite her small stature, it almost appeared as if she loomed larger than them both.

“You knew me from before?” Gabriel slowly picked himself off the ground.

Ana gave him a look. “Of course I knew you, you witless cabbage. You think I just pick up any old strays in the forest?”

“You’re meant to be dead,” Jack finally found his voice. He reached out and poked her in the cheek, surprised at how solid it was. Not a ghost then.

She smacked his hand away and raised an eyebrow. “Could say the same about you, Jack.”

He gave her a humourless smile. “You’re not wrong.”

Ana reached up a hand, lightning quick and grabbed a hold of his jaw, pulling him down so that he looked directly into her eye. “Seems like you’ve caught a bad case of vampirism. Hmm,” she turned his head this way and that. “Don’t know if it’s curable, but I could probably give it a go if I had the right tools and help.”

Jack felt his eyes go wide as she let go of his face and he opened his mouth—

“Wait, sorry,” Gabriel finally spoke up. “Who the fuck are you?”

Without warning Ana lifted up her longbow and cracked it across Gabriel’s head.

Gabriel let out a strangled yelp and clutched his forehead. “What was that for?”

“Try and at least remember my name, for the gods sake—

“You told me were an alchemist named Ana. I meant, how do you fit into all this? Why are you here? What is going on?” Gabriel checked his fingers for blood and finding none, settled for a thoroughly unimpressed look. “And why did you throw a sack of gold at my head?”

“To try and knock some sense into you,” Ana said and took another swipe at Gabriel with her long bow, this one he managed to avoid by ducking to the side. “Hah! See? You can remember things when you want to. Come. I’ll tell you the rest on the way to Gibraltar. It’s a long journey and we have plenty to catch up on.”

Jack watched a range of emotions flicker over Gabriel’s face as he looked between the gold on the ground, Ana climbing into the driver’s seat of the cart, and his own cold, narrowed eyes. There was a war of tumultuous emotions in Gabriel and Jack held his ground as he waited for a victor to emerge.

Gabriel finally arranged his features in what he probably thought was a neutral expression and bent down to pick up the gold. Jack had seen that look before and he knew at least somewhere, deep down, Gabriel was feeling guilty. Good.

He tried not to let the relief overwhelm him as he began to walk over to Holwood’s cart of contraband.

“Just because I’m coming with you,” the quiet edge in Gabriel’s voice made Jack pause. “Does not mean I have forgiven you or forgotten that you are the one who put me in this position. Stay away from me.”

Jack took a deep breath and swallowed the rising guilt and shame. He gritted his teeth against it and gave him a half salute over his shoulder. “Yes, Sir.” He pulled himself up onto the driver’s seat next to Ana and stared stonily ahead, fuming.

Ana reached over and flicked him between the eyes with enough force to knock out any normal human. He just flinched slightly and turned his narrowed eyes at her. She had a lot to answer for too.

“Oh, don’t look at me like that,” Ana rolled her eye. “Just because you think you want to go back doesn’t mean I can’t see how afraid you are of it.” She gave a pointed look in Gabriel’s direction. “We’re all afraid of facing our mistakes, myself included. You need to be gentle with him, Jack. He’s not the Gabriel we knew and he’s more terrified of himself than anything else.”

Jack squeezed his eyes shut. “I know,” his voice shook. “I just want him back. So much.”

He felt Ana’s arm around his shoulders as she gave him a light squeeze. “Me too. Perhaps we’ll find him back home. Perhaps we’ll find a lot of answers.”

“You owe me some,” Jack said.

Ana twitched the reigns. “We’ve got time.” The horses snorted and pulled forward, the cart moving smoothly over the light snow.

Gabriel’s black stallion led the way North. Led the way home.