Matthias Graves | Simon Monroe (inbalance) wrote in thereincarnates, @ 2018-01-19 20:19:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | lucien prince, matthias graves |
Who: Matthias Graves and Lucien Prince
What: There's only so long a gay zombie not-really-dad can avoid his gay wizard not-really-son.
Where: Jim's apartment in Chicago
When: Friday, January 19; evening
Warnings: Sweet enough to raise your blood sugar to dangerous levels.
When Matthias had said that he didn't want Lucien to see him like this he'd meant it. He was a monster now and even though Jim had still loved him it hadn't meant that the rest of the world would feel the same way. To his parents, to the rest of his friends, he'd stayed safely dead so that they didn't have to see him as this diminished version of himself (not diminished, Simon still insisted, but Matthias struggled to feel as Redeemed as Simon was proud to be). Bloodless skin and faded eyes, never quite alive... mothers would pull their children aside from him in the streets. He'd wondered every time he ventured to Happy Endings even under the best of cover whether this would be the time that someone chose to shoot him on sight for being something out of the entire culture's nightmare.
Then there'd been Callum and Matthias had found himself drawn into caring again—he'd known that what he felt for Jim was powerful enough to overcome the numbness of death but he hadn't expected a charming redheaded flirt of a child who he'd found himself reluctantly amused by. Callum was nothing like Lucien; there was a physicality to him that Lucien didn't have and Matthias couldn't picture himself in a million years sharing a beloved poem with Callum like he could and had with Lucien. That didn't make Lucien any weaker or Callum any less clever. There really wasn't any reason to compare the two at all except that Matthias had cared.
He'd wondered if Jim had set it up on purpose. Given that his boyfriend seemed to have no hesitation to use Callum as a lure to draw Matthias back to the club for pleasure rather than business, Matthias thought that it wasn't exactly unlikely.
Little by little the idea of seeing Lucien again for himself had worn Matthias's resistance down. Callum and the familiar almost fatherly rush of affection that Matthias felt for him had been the last push that it took for the walls to crumble.
It had taken longer than it should have to decide how. He could have spoken to Lucien on the boards. Could have given him a call. From the things that Jim told him he could have found Lucien just by going to Francis's club on very nearly any given night if he'd wanted to do it face to face. None of that seemed quite right though. Lucien deserved more from him than that. Lucien deserved the privacy to say whatever he needed to say, to yell or curse at him without anyone else seeing.
Matthias had told Jim that he didn't care what reason he gave Lucien to come—if he told him that it was Resistance business or that he'd found something that he thought Matthias would want Lucien to have. All that mattered was that Jim got Lucien there before Matthias found another reason to delay it. He'd thought up several since Jim had told him that Lucien was coming. He'd smudged on the heavy makeup that he'd asked Jim for and washed it off only to apply it again. It made his skin look not quite real, completely even in tone as it was. The contacts he'd popped in weren't quite the same shade his own eyes had been... again, just far enough off to make it clear that there was something different about him. Just enough to make it clear that he was trying to hide that he was dead.
If he waited much longer he was sure that Simon would persuade him to wash it off again. If he was going to look wrong anyway what was the point of trying to cover up what he really was?
Lucien might have spent a little more time thinking how strange it was that Jim was asking him to come to his home if he wasn’t already pretty used to receiving instructions from Jim that he knew better than to question. After working under Jim for as long as he had, Lucien was all to aware of his boss’s particular quirks and the incredibly short fuse he hid until you least expected it. Jim Moore was the sort of dangerously eccentric, volatile man who you’d have to be near suicidal to actually try and piss off on purpose. He was like a viper in the grass. Unless you wanted to get bitten, you didn’t go near it.
Sure, the location was a little more unexpected. At one point Lucien had been somewhat familiar with the apartment, and Matthias's, after all the time he'd spent there even before he'd known about the Resistance or been part of it himself. Lucien still couldn't really think about that without feeling a tiny pang in his chest whenever he was reminded of Matthias. Even after a year, that has never really gone away.
He'd left Francis and Percy at the club with the promise that he'd be back as soon as he could. Obviously that promise had been directed more at Percy than the canine’s other human. Lucien imagined that Francis could get along just fine without him and didn’t need those kinds of reassurances, but Percy was just a dog. Clearly he needed more reassurances than a human might. It was no secret by now that Lucien was guilty of a few weak spots, and the little fluffy white dog he’d found on the streets was one of them. That was okay. He was in reconnaissance, he knew everyone else’s secrets, no one knew his.
Once outside Jim’s place, Lucien paused for a moment as he realized that he hadn’t actually been here since Matthias had died. It was a strange sort of feeling that settled heavily in his gut as he finally forced himself up the stairs and rang the bell to be let in. Jim had told him that he had an assignment for him that he didn’t want to discuss over the phone, but when Jim opened the door and invited Lucien inside, he immediately left him standing just outside the living room to disappear into the kitchen. Figuring Jim would eventually come back, Lucien knew better than to actually follow him and instead removed his scarf and jacket, leaving them hanging on the coat rack in the hallway as he stepped further into the apartment.
Part of Matthias had wanted Jim there when he stepped out and saw Lucien for the first time since he'd risen from the dead. Jim had become his security blanket, Matthias's only safe place. He had been attached before his death in a way that he'd never been attached to anyone else but after... after, Jim was quite literally the only thing in Matthias's world. Jim had disliked the world so much without Matthias in it that he'd done what he had to in order to have him back even knowing that it might make Matthias angry enough to leave forever. That was the sort of thing that changed everything.
If Jim had been in the room though, Matthias would have been tempted to hide behind him. Use him as a shield against Lucien just as he'd used him as a shield against everything else.
Matthias had no doubts that if he waited long enough Jim would step out of the kitchen and Lucien would never know that there had been another reason that Jim had asked him over. Even after he heard the door open and close again behind him Matthias knew that he could change his mind. Decide he wasn't ready.
Strangely enough that was what made him ready. Or perhaps not so strangely... no one ever did well once he'd been backed into a corner. Not at anything other than a vicious response.
With one more gentle touch to his own face to make certain that he could still feel the greasy smear of thick foundation, Matthias stepped out of the hallway and into the living room. The sight of Lucien tied a knot in his chest and it took him a long, horrible moment to find his voice. "I promise I'm real."
Because what other question would anyone ask first when someone had come back from the dead in secret?
When Lucien first saw Matthias, he thought he was hallucinating. Nobody could really blame him for thinking that, no matter how many times he’d wished he could see the man again, Lucien wasn’t delusional enough to actually think that it was possible. Many more things as a reincarnate were possible, but cheating death was still a hard one to achieve. His next thought was that Matthias was clearly a ghost, which wasn’t as crazy of an idea since there were even ghosts in Draco’s world. Usually confined to Hogwarts, but still. They existed. The idea of Matthias being anything less than flesh and blood though was a little unbearable. He’d always been so full of warmth and life when he’d been alive, imagining that the man Lucien remembered had been reduced to something like that was almost heartbreaking.
He didn’t look like a ghost though, he seemed much too solid for that, and in the half second it took for Lucien’s brain to catch up with the rest of him, he almost immediately started. Not out of fear, but out of pure shock and also a little confusion. He promised he was real? In the moment, Lucien couldn’t even begin to make sense of what he was saying. That was his voice, but he wasn’t real. He was dead. He’d been dead for over a year. Even when people did come back from the dead, that was a little long to wait, wasn’t it? Lucien suddenly realized he knew next to nothing about Matthias’s reincarnate beyond the bare facts, or if he had known anything else then he’d completely forgotten all of the details in the moment, but he would have known if Matthias had been capable of coming back from the dead. Wouldn’t he?
“You…” The shock that had first registered on his face was starting to give way to somewhere between disbelief and misplaced anger, unsure of where to actually put it in the moment. Was this some sort of cruel trick? No, of course it wasn’t. Jim was a lot of things and Lucien could never hope to understand him the way that Matthias had seemed to. Where Matthias was soft edges and warmth, Jim had always been cold, sharp edges, and yet Matthias had loved him anyway. Even though Lucien didn’t know Jim the way he’d known Matthias, he knew that Jim had loved him too. So this wasn’t a trick, but that still left the question of what this was. Lucien didn’t move from where he still stood frozen to the spot, eyes narrowed suspiciously and the tone of his voice guarded before it cracked noticeably on a higher note in the middle of his demand for answers. He was still so shocked he didn’t even notice at first that though there was no mistaking this man for his dead friend, that there was something off about his features. “What’s going on?”
It was a fair question and yet Matthias didn't know exactly how to answer it. He should have. He'd had more than enough time to play and replay a hundred different scenarios in his head that all started almost exactly like this; him and Lucien standing in front of each other again. The where or the how was less important than the fact that they were there at all and Matthias had tried again and again to find the right words to explain to Lucien what this was and why he hadn't come to speak to him immediately about it once he was himself again.
Lucien didn't understand anything about what had happened to Matthias and it would be easy, so very easy, to pretend that this was all new. That he'd just come back to himself and that he'd been a mindless creature that Jim was keeping safely contained for longer than he had been. Jim wouldn't contradict him if he lied to Lucien about this. It would be a white lie even for once. The least harmful lie that Matthias had ever told in his life because it would be meant to keep Lucien from knowing how much sooner the two of them could have been reunited and how much sooner he could have stopped mourning... if he was even mourning anymore. If he hadn't moved on and now Matthias was opening wounds all over again that had scarred but still healed enough that Lucien didn't think of him at all.
Part of Matthias still thought that would be preferable. Lucien could have moved on and not had to live with the knowledge of what Matthias was. He might have stopped missing him at all. Might have stopped missing him a long time ago, the perverse part of Matthias that enjoyed the pain reminded him. He might have meant less to Lucien than he'd thought.
"I woke up," he told Lucien simply. That was the long and short of it. That was the only explanation that he would really have to give if he chose to leave it at that but he couldn't. He couldn't and he couldn't even find that white lie that might have smoothed everything over into a more charming kind of reunion than confessing the truth would ever give them. "A month after I died. I wasn't... myself." It was a kind way of describing what he'd been in that stretch of months between crawling out of his grave and coming back to himself. If Jim had ever done a truly kind thing in his life it was keeping those months private and not forcing Lucien in particular to see him so far outside of himself that it might have ruined the way he perceived him forever.
Thanks to Jim there were a great many things that Matthias hadn't done that might have haunted him forever. Moreso than the things that already would.
Matthias wanted to step closer. He wanted to put a hand on Lucien's shoulder. Embrace him. Except then... then Lucien would feel for himself how cold Matthias was. "I'm still not, entirely." And he never would be again. Even if he accepted that he was blessed, Redeemed, Matthias would never be the self that he was again and that was a death that could not be taken back, one that he could never rise from.
“You woke up?” Lucien could feel himself starting to spiral. He hadn't done it in a long time, but he still recognized the signs. A tightening in his chest, dry mouth, dizziness. It had happened to him enough times that he knew what he needed to do was take a deep breath, otherwise it'd very quickly deteriorate into a full blown panic attack. The breath he took was a little shallow, but it was enough to keep him from getting too agitated, too fast.
His head was still spinning, though, and no matter how hard he tried, Lucien couldn't even begin to succeed in wrapping his head around what Matthias was trying to tell him. He ‘woke up’? An entire month after he died? He hadn't been ‘himself’? Lucien had no idea what any of that meant, and it felt a little like he was under water, watching Matthias's mouth moving and only sort of hearing him, but the meaning of his words was muddled and lost.
For months after (he'd thought) Matthias had died, all Lucien had wanted was for it to not be true. That he'd wake up the next day and Matthias would be alive again, Lucien would stop by Happy Endings later and see Matthias there like he always did when Jim was at the club. Lucien hadn't set one foot into Happy Endings since Matthias's death, it had been too painful for him. The only reason he'd even gotten through those first few hard months was because of Francis and Percy.
Lucien had wished to see Matthias again for so long, but now that he was finally getting what he wanted, suddenly he didn't know what to do. All the things he'd wanted to say to Matthias for the last year froze on his tongue. He shifted in place, not moving any closer to him but not moving further away from him either. His voice was filled with caution, lines of confusion still written all over his face, but he sounded a little less hysterical than he had two seconds ago. “... I don't understand.”
It was strange to feel so nervous and yet not feel his heart racing in his chest even after as long as Matthias had been... as he was. The things that had made him nervous since then were few and far between though. Matthias hadn't let himself be around anything that would make him nervous. Not until he'd ventured out for just one errand and found himself entangled in far more of the outside world than that. Nothing had made him as nervous as standing in front of Lucien now though. Nothing had made him more conscious of the fact that his palms didn't sweat and that he had absolutely no problems holding entirely still. All his nerves were in his mind; none of the automatic responses that should have been firing.
Lucien wasn't running and so Matthias risked a few steps closer, eyes fixed on his young friend's face. He looked... good. Matthias wondered if he was eating right. If he was taking the time to sleep and take care of himself or if he was just studying all the time. Before he'd died he wouldn't have thought twice about asking. Now he wasn't certain that he'd brought the right back from the grave with him.
"It's all very hard to explain." That was a lie. There was a word that Matthias could say that would make all of it clear and that might succeed in sending Lucien running where the mere sight of a dead man hadn't. Matthias wasn't quite to use that word even if it would have made the entire thing easier. "It's called... PDS. Partially Deceased Syndrome. Simon had it..." And what Simon had Matthias had. He hadn't been certain that he would. He hadn't been certain at all that it was something that would pass along when it was contracted instead of something he was born with.
Except maybe it had been something that Simon was born with. Something in his genetic code that made him rise under the right conditions. No one had a better explanation for it than that. All they knew was how to stop it. "There's a medication I have to take. That's all."
He wanted to claim that with that he was normal. He couldn't, not with Lucien. Lucien was too smart for that and Matthias had already been forgiven for lying to him once. He didn't think that he'd be so lucky if he was found out a second time.
“So… what. You’re only half dead?” More things that Lucien couldn’t process in the moment, still too taken back by the unexpected sight of his previously dead friend and mentor to even begin to start wrapping his mind around what Matthias was trying to tell him. Matthias. It was Matthias, wasn’t it? Jim was many things, but Lucien didn’t think that even he was capable of that kind of cruel trick. If not for Lucien’s sake, then for his own. The only thing Lucien knew about for sure when it came to the other man was how Jim had felt about Matthias, and he was pretty sure Jim knew how Lucien had felt about him too.
As much as Atticus was also a mentor to him, with Matthias it had always been different. Atticus was a mentor and a teacher, but Matthias? He had always been a mentor and a friend. It wasn’t magic and a shared source that they had in common, Matthias shared the interests that Lucien had kept close to his heart, long before Draco Malfoy had become a permanent fixture in his life. Matthias loved poetry, and literature, and he had always been happy to talk about them with Lucien for hours. When Lucien joined the Resistance, Jim was his superior, but Matthias was the one who had guided him gently through it.
Maybe Lucien was having a hard time coming to grips with everything happening right now, but he thought he was starting to understand it a little more when Matthias took those few steps forward. Lucien felt the instinct to take a few steps back himself, purely out of self-preservation and not necessarily because he was afraid, but his brain and his motor functions still weren’t working in harmony together so he didn’t budge, and after Matthias stepped closer Lucien could see a little of what he was talking about.
He looked… well, Lucien knew enough about makeup to know that Matthias was wearing some, but that wasn’t why he looked off to him. He didn’t look quite like himself anymore, and yet there weren’t that many obvious changes to his appearance. Lucien could still tell that there was something not quite right about him though, and he blinked, staring a little harder at Matthias now that the rest was starting to sink in. He was dead. Or partially dead. But he was also… Lucien’s voice was soft and timid, more childlike than he’d ever sounded before as he tried desperately not to get his hopes up. “... You’re really here?”
Out of everything that Matthias couldn't promise Lucien, that was the one thing that he could say for certain. "I'm really here. In the flesh." Even though that flesh wasn't what it had been once. Matthias supposed he could have reassured Lucien that he wouldn't be going anywhere; that was true enough too. He was far harder to kill than he had been when he was still human and it wasn't as if he was going to age. He'd be around for as long as Lucien was. Longer. It wasn't a thought that he was comfortable with and not one that he'd come to terms with yet at all when he was still adjusting to being alive again but... he had plenty of time for that.
No matter what else had changed about Matthias, the smile that he gave Lucien was the same, warm in a way that the rest of him could never be. Lucien wasn't running. He sounded hopeful and impossibly young and he wasn't running away. That was enough for Matthias; he stepped even closer still, close enough that Lucien could reach out and touch him if he wanted to. That was a step that Matthias wouldn't take. Not when he knew that his hands were like ice. He was close enough for Lucien to tell that he was solid.
"I'm... undead." That was a word that had more connotations in the real world than calling himself partially deceased but with every second that Lucien stayed there Matthias grew a little more certain that he'd at least hear him out. "But my mind is the same. My memories." As long as he took his daily injection.
Somehow it all seemed less dire when he was explaining it this way, to Lucien and to himself. Like it was some sort of manageable disease. Like he was a diabetic in need of insulin.
Matthias was going to have to tell Jim that he was right about everything later. He should have done this a long time ago. At least Jim really did like to hear that he was right; Matthias had a feeling that he'd get rewarded for that very thoroughly.
Of course Lucien knew what ‘undead’ meant, even if the idea of that word being applied to Matthias still seemed a little unreal to him. He might not have much time for things like television and reading fiction for pleasure, but Lucien hadn’t been living under a rock. He had some idea of what Matthias was now even if he still wasn’t sure how any of this was actually possible, his mind just wouldn’t let him make any real sense out of it. Maybe he didn’t need to understand it all right now. Maybe, as much as it clearly defied all logic and laws of physics, for now Lucien could just be grateful that he had Matthias back.
They were close enough now that Lucien could really see, for the first time, just how different Matthias really looked. It wasn’t just the makeup, though now that they were standing much closer to each other than before, Lucien could see just how heavily it’d been applied on his face. It gave Matthias the look of something like a made up doll, his skin more porcelain looking than real. There was also something a little off about the color of his eyes, it was a slightly different shade from what Lucien remembered. It’s not as if he’d spent a great deal amount of time studying the exact shade of Matthias’s eyes before, it’s just that Lucien had always had a good eye for detail. It was one of the things that had made him into a good spy.
Despite the small, noticeable differences in his appearance, when Matthias smiled at him, Lucien didn’t think he was imagining things when he saw how that same impossibly warm smile seemed to light his whole face up, making him look briefly like the old Matthias again. It settled heavy in his chest, right where the hole that had been there since Matthias had died used to be. Lucien wasn’t a hugger. He never hugged anyone willingly, aside from his mother, but in that moment he felt the inexplicable urge to hug Matthias, despite the fact that before now it wasn’t something they had ever really done either.
He did it anyway, not saying another word as he stepped into Matthias’s personal space and immediately wrapped his arms around him, only a few inches shorter than the older man but suddenly feeling much smaller as Lucien hugged him. It was impossible not to notice then how much colder Matthias was than him, but he didn’t care. All he cared about was that Matthias was here, that he was back.
Of all the reactions that Matthias could have imagined this wasn't one of them. Not because he hadn't thought that Lucien wasn't that fond of him. Somewhat because he hadn't been imagining that many circumstances where his reintroduction went so well. Mostly it was that physical affection wasn't something that Matthias really associated with Lucien. He'd always been just that little bit withdrawn, self-contained in a way that Matthias understood and accepted even if he hadn't shared it in some ways. It wasn't something that Matthias was averse to; it was simply something that had mostly fallen by the wayside since they'd lost his sister.
Unexpected as it was he still closed his arms around Lucien immediately, wrapping him in a hug that was more careful than it would have been if Matthias were still human but still just on the gentle side of tight. His chest didn't rise and fall with his breath and there would be no soothing thud of a heartbeat but Matthias let himself believe that Lucien truly wouldn't mind that at all.
Heedless of the fact that his makeup might smudge, particularly since he wasn't that skilled at applying it yet, Matthias leaned the side of his face against Lucien’s hair. “I won't be going anywhere,” he murmured. No more disease that could take him. No more succumbing to anything that wouldn't kill him instantly. In a way Matthias supposed he was one of the safest things in the world to love.
“I have so much to catch up on. I'm so sorry.” It seemed inconceivable that Matthias had ever stayed away for as long as he'd chosen to.
Lucien squeezed his eyes shut tight as soon as he felt Matthias’s arms close around him, the last of the tension in his shoulders leaving as he breathed a genuine sigh of relief, like a weight he’d been carrying around for over a year now had finally lifted off of him for good. Lucien had always known that his fondness for the older man had far surpassed his fondness for most people, and the higher regard he held him in not easily matched by others, but maybe it wasn’t until he thought he’d really lost him that Lucien realized what exactly Matthias was to him. A friend, yes, but also so much more than that.
As ridiculous as it sounded considering there still wasn’t too significant of an age gap between the two of them, in many ways, Matthias felt like the father figure Lucien had never really had. The father who had started to raise him was gone from his life before Lucien had ever really gotten to know him, and Robert? He might be Lucien’s biological father, but for too many reasons to list, he would never feel like a father should to a son. Whether or not he’d done it intentionally, Matthias had managed to fill that void for Lucien, and Lucien hadn’t even realized what he’d really had until he thought he’d lost it for good.
It was hard not to notice the lack of a heart beat when Lucien rested his head against Matthias’s chest, or the fact that his chest didn’t move the way a person’s would with every breath they took, but Lucien didn’t care. Happiness was a concept that Lucien wasn’t intimately familiar with and very rarely ever let himself feel, but with Matthias’s words, he really felt it. He couldn’t wait to tell Francis. “Don’t be sorry. We have more time now.” Maybe still not enough, but Lucien was young, and Matthias wasn’t going anywhere.