hold fast, or expire

"Keep moving," Dismas demands. "Keep moving. Come on. I can't carry you. Slop your brain back into your skull-pot and for the love of whatever you call holy, press on!"

"What is the sense of it? There's nothing holy left in this land. The heavens are filled with lead and all of us here are damned, damned, three times damned..."

The heavens, and Reynauld's head besides. An ill augury. Dismas drags him a few more gruelling yards through the muck of the manor grounds.

"Speak for yourself," he says. "Some of us are onto our fourth or fifth."

And damn all his reasons for being here, Dismas is giving consideration to making Reynauld his sixth. Plate mail's easier to move when you're the one wearing it; trying to drag someone else's steel carcass through this stinking mire is another thing entirely. He's lightheaded with terror and blood loss, the nasty gash he's taken across the belly pulsing feverishly with his exertions. If he has to haul this lamenting rustbucket a single step further there's real danger his innards'll journey outwards, and he's seen quite enough of that kind of business today, thank you.

It's getting dark. It is getting dark. The hamlet's lamplit windows are dimming in a thickening fog. Anything could be in this fog, creatures of strange gait and locomotion, some skulking coagulation oozed from the ruins. The manor's long shadow breathes on the back of his neck, and lord help him, Dismas didn't make it out of that hellhole just to die within pissing distance of a tavern.

With a bracing curse, he heaves himself and Reynauld yet onward. Do not go gentle and so on and so forth and etcetera.

"Where is the Light now? So far from our cries of anguish—" Reynauld's voice is a guttural whisper. He might be sobbing. "Wherefore are we forsaken?"

It's the kind of question best answered with another question. "Wherefore am I not halfway through my third whiskey," Dismas says.

The stuff the barkeep serves up smells like boot polish and tastes like liquid spite, but he'll need it tonight. Even now, closing his eyes to ride out another crest of pain, he sees the slavering jaws of the hound as it feasts on its own master. The glassy-eyed rapture of the flagellant. Can all but taste the humid stink of their eviscerations.

The memory makes him gag, jostling his own tender insides. It hurts in ways he can barely fathom, which only makes him gag more. Ensnared by this folly, he drops to his knees in the mud, abandoning Reynauld to clutch at his stomach, yank down his kerchief and chuck his metaphorical guts up as gently as he can, which isn't very. Fresh hot blood slips between his fingers with each convulsion, and his knees sink into the mud. Well. If he's going to die, he may as well do it where the ground is soft.

With a clank, Reynauld kneels next to him as calmly as he might descend upon a prayer cushion. He rests his heavy gauntlet on Dismas' head like a benediction, so perhaps that's what he thinks he's doing.

"A right bloody shambles we made of that, eh?" Dismas wipes his mouth with the back of a shaking hand and reinstates his mask. He's not expecting a response, or anything more than a dreary bewailing if one does materialise.

But, "Blessed are the sorrowful. They shall be consoled," says Reynauld, his intonation more level than anything that Dismas has heard out of him since they'd routed from those treacherous hallways. Clawed back a scrap of reason by latching onto some good old-fashioned dogmata, perhaps. Faith like a standing stone, a ritual boundary-mark that stands long after ritual and boundary are lost. Heartening, except for one small detail.

"Are you reading me my last bloody rites, you prick?" Dismas says. "So help me, I'll throttle you with your own surcoat."

"Pardon his sins and give him eternal life in your—" Reynauld breaks off with a bemused sigh. It echoes around his helm as though lost. "Would you die without sacrament?"

"I'd rather not die at all, if it's not a bother. Or... not just yet. Might change my mind next we go back in there."

Reynauld's helm jerks up. He regards the dark sky for a long moment from behind its slatted visor. "We're—"

"Out of that pit, no thanks to you, so how 'bout you stop lollygagging and find a thrice-damned bandage before I expire."

The air prickles with Reynauld's indignation, but his hand drops from Dismas' head and onto his shoulder, then searches its way to his fist where it's pressed firm against the cleaved leather of his jerkin. His gauntlet is cold and sets a shiver coursing down Dismas' sweaty back, the skin on his forearms puckering into gooseflesh at the touch.

Then it isn't the chill of his armour that has him shivering, but something else. Something pristine that slides like quicksilver just outside of his comprehension.

The fog surrounding them is suffused by a sourceless pale light, which in turn suffuses Dismas with an unlikely sense of peace. Was this it, then? He'll take it, having envisioned worse exits. It certainly beats having his face bitten off by a perambulatory cadaver, even if that might be a more deserving fate for him, all things in balance.

He lets out a breath that gently luminesces and then fades, as does the light, dissipating into the drab gloaming and leaving nary an afterimage behind his weary eyelids.

And weary he is. Far too weary to be anything but alive. What a load of old rot.

He uncurls his fist. Something stings but it's only where his fingernails were wedged against his palm. His stomach feels tender but bearable. Oh, why not. A laying on of hands isn't the strangest thing to happen this evening, resplendent with terrors as it's been.

"There. Now, will you stand, or will I have to scruff you like a mewling kit?" Reynauld says, either oblivious to the irony or brazening it out.

With some laborious effort Dismas staggers halfway to his feet, leaning on Reynauld's pauldron to get himself the rest of the way up and sinking him deeper into the squelching mud as he does. Probably shouldn't take quite so much satisfaction in that, the fellow having just done well by him, but Dismas can't help but feel the straits would not have been so dire if he'd kept a better grip on his marbles.

Well, they'd know what to expect next time.

Next time. Lord.

He holds out both hands; when Reynauld grasps him about the forearms he leans back, a counterweight to his armoured bulk. It works, almost. For a moment they reach an equilibrium. Then his boots slip in the mud.

"There is something wrong with that place," Reynauld mutters once again, his mud-caked gauntlet curled around a tumbler. Dismas assumes he doesn't actually drink but didn't know what else to do with himself; he's nursed it with such intensity that it's started reacting to something in the tavern's air. "I thought I'd seen all of the horrors this world could conceive of, but it yet finds new ways to test me."

Dismas, comfortably into his third and his face half-numb as nature intended, is fairly certain good whiskey—or any whiskey—oughtn't go cloudy in that manner. Not that it's going to stop him applying the stuff to his freshly-vivified insides. He has a sleepless night to thwart.

"Seen worse in a tavern come late in the eve." His leg bounces, boot heel tap-tapping on the sticky bare floorboards. "Talk about your shambling abominations."

"Your glibness marks you a fool." Reynauld says this directly enough, but with an earnestness that mostly strips it of contempt. Mostly.

In another time and place Dismas would have joyfully started a fistfight over that, but tonight he only gives an ambivalent shrug. "Have to laugh, though, don't you? Go mad otherwise." He nods at Reynauld's glass. "You going to drink that or marry it?"

Reynauld abruptly stands, gathering up his greatsword and the satchel he keeps stuffed full of religious tracts or communion wafers or other such assorted whatevers. Maybe his failure to drink a solitary drop is because there isn't anyone under there to neck this infernal liquor and he's nothing but an animate, grousing suit of armour, his helm too tarnished for Dismas to even see his own judgement reflected in it. He wishes he could find the idea more amusing than he does.

"Neither is to my liking," Reynauld says. "No doubt some wretched sot will avail himself of it instead."

"T'would be a safe bet. Need to re-pickle my liver." He may be a blackguard and a knave, but never let it be said that Dismas is an ingrate. "My thanks for that, by the by."

By way of acknowledgement, Reynauld slings his glass along the bar. Dismas catches it in the curve of his palm, and with a gracious nod, tops his drink up with a clink of chipped rims. The clouded whiskey threads through the clear like blood spreads from a body face-down in a puddle.

"Early night for you then, squire?" he says, holding it up to the tavern's meagre light for closer inspection. Grim.

"Midnight is upon us. You'd do well to seek your own bed anon."

Dismas has no idea how he can tell. It always feels like three in the morning around here. "Me? Not tired."

This is his traitor body's cue to force a vast yawn out of him. He hides it in his drink as best he can.

As inscrutable as his armoured self is, Reynauld manages to convey when he's about to be irritating well enough. Dismas has butted heads with holy types before. They all exude a kind of blunt paternalism that he's long learned is neither thrilling nor productive to argue with. Not that it's stopped him from trying, but what's life without a bit of futility. Reynauld has at least proven more tolerant of his infelicities than most other incense-snorters.

"A weary body is a weary mind," Reynauld says, "and a weary mind is dogged by disquiet, which in turn renders it vulnerable to trickery and to temptation. You should rest."

"Quite like a bit of trickery and temptation, as it happens." Dismas raises his glass and then downs it. It's like a punch in the nose and does about the same to improve his mood. "So let's see where the evening takes me. Best escape while you can, good knight. Good night!"

Alhazred blows in on a cold wind one evening and leaves the tavern door banging on its hinges, much to the barkeep's silent but tangible disgruntlement. He introduces himself as a student of the abstruse, a seeker of the recondite, an occultist of the forbidden arts. Dismas reckons he's a man with a death wish behind that sickle moon smile, but he's not in any position to judge.

He seats himself at the tun barrel that's serving as a table and plonks what is by all appearances a human skull down next to his flagon of ale. It's wearing a candle like a jaunty hat. This casual flaunting of a dismembered corpse is a new one on Dismas, but he supposes there's scarce room to be squeamish, circumstances being what they are.

"And whence do you hail?" Reynauld asks him. His suspicion is palpable.

"Good sir knight, I am a citizen of the world," Alhazred says without missing a beat. "I have reaped my knowledge from behind ageworn stone and walls of uncountable age. I have travelled as though scattered by the wind, blown hither and thither to all four corners of the globe. I have dwelt in cities of antiquity only told of in strange tales, roamed crumbling temples held aloft by ancient tetrameles, delved into vaults of jade and terracotta, the burial tombs of pharaohs, the holds of earth-sunk ships. I have sought answers to my questions in places long obscured by time and warning, weathering snow and flood and sandstorm to glean what morsels of wisdom I could from their antediluvian libraries, their repositories of vellum, their chained tomes, their codices, their palimpsests, from words etched into fragile gold plate or on lacquered monks' robes or scrawled onto a wall in blood. In all of these places have I lain my head and rested my bones. But as for where I call home—"

He pauses. It's purest theatre.

"Bermondsey."

"Bermondsey," echoes Reynauld.

Junia, who until now has regarded Alhazred's skull and candle with unveiled distaste, blinks. "I know Bermondsey," she says, "the riverside in particular. As a youth, I lived there—before I was given to the convent, that is—"

And off they go with childhood tales of river-stink and slip-sliding along slimy wooden galleries and how the foreshore muck was filled with red worms that would ooze between their toes. Dismas is a bit pissed off by it if he's honest, but only because he knows he'll sound like a right prick if he tells them it's a stupid idea to make any friends around here.

What fate awaits them in those ravenous halls? A slow death, or a quick one. Nothing more. It'll all end in tears, and the last thing Dismas wants is to start feeling responsible for these sorry sods, so he pretends to be bored by their prattling and excuses himself.

Past the drab curtain at the back of the room, knuckles and dice in the gambling hall rattle, the riffle of cards like a siren song. They don't let him back there after the commotion he caused the first night. The villagers might look as though they're recently exhumed, but they aren't the rubes Dismas fingered them for. His weighted dice had quickly raised some eyebrows, and then some ire.

He sits himself at the bar instead, where he sullenly worries at the skin around his thumbnail, everything else being chewed to the quick.

Reynauld has followed him in his retreat. He can tell because he's about as stealthy as a bucket of rusty nails. Dismas doesn't mind it. It's not like he'll be looking for conversation. Not the sort this ne'er-do-well might supply, leastways. It's funny though, he expected him to hit it off with Junia what with having reams of piousness in common, but seems like Reynauld isn't all that interested in finding communality with his faith as he is in constructing ramparts with it. Dismas unbunches his shoulders from around his ears and fishes a coin out of his pocket. Barkeep's buggered off someplace so he walks it over his fingers while he waits for him to reappear.

"What do you reckon then, holy man," he says to Reynauld's looming presence. "Evens?"

Reynauld slowly rests his cowters upon the bar, the better to regard him with disapprobation.

"No? Holding out for more lucrative odds, are we? 'Knew that we ventured on such dangerous seas, that if we wrought out life 'twas ten to one...' "

"Are you proposing we wager upon our companions' survival?"

"That's a bit tasteless, isn't it?" Dismas flicks the coin into the air, catches it, spins it on the uneven bartop. "Ours as well. Fair's fair."

"Dismas," Reynauld slowly says. It's the first time he's addressed him by name. Dismas is sure of it, because he'd remember the way his voice rasps on its sibilance and shivers up his spine like an ill omen. "Why is it you came here, to this hamlet?"

Oh, lordy. Where the hell is that barkeep.

His reflection is a sallow smear in Reynauld's dented visor, his kerchief a slash of red about his neck. He knows what his craggy old mug looks like; he's seen it enough times in crow-quill scratch on curled parchment nailed to trees, accompanied by such edifying insights into his character as WANTED FOR MURDER AND BRIGANDRY. Always a not-so-silent judgement, and here's no different.

He stops the coin's spin with an outstretched finger and sets it dancing over his knuckles again, heel bouncing and knee hitting the underside of the bar in soothing rhythm.

"I could ask you the same thing," he says. If he's lucky, Reynauld will wall himself up like an anchorite instead of answering.

"I heeded a call," Reynauld says. "I have commited my soul to the holy Light, but it is not enough to merely wield the Flame. One must become—"

Been throwing a lot of ones and twos lately. Dismas sighs, resting his elbow on the bar and his forehead in his hand.

"... you did ask." He sounds somewhat peevish. For a man in full plate he's easy to needle.

"I was deflecting," Dismas says grudgingly. His guilt's had a jostle from the affront in Reynauld's tone. Happens more often these days, like his soft underbelly's been exposed for the poking. "Fine, all right. I'm here on a change of course, having reached a crossroads of sorts, and—well, a certain kind of ghastly thing awaits a highwayman there. Of the roads available to me, this was the least worst."

The coin slips over his fingers. It had taken a lot to get into that carriage. He'd not travelled in one for some time, having attributed to them both bad luck and an irreparable shame.

"Bit of a last-ditch attempt to do something useful with myself," he says. "A Hail Mary, if you like."

That indeed has some kind of an effect. Reynauld's posture shifts subtly, his shoulders coming out of a slump, helm tilting as he raises his chin. Uplifted, and that's uplifting, in a strange sort of way. Dismas feels a twinge where his honour used to be.

"Then perhaps there is hope for you yet, highwayman," Reynauld says, ruining it, but Dismas smiles at him anyway. He can proselytise if it makes him happy, as the barkeep has finally reappeared and a whiskey of dubious provenance is within his grasp.

Where's his damn coin gone? He'd have noticed if he'd dropped it, unless he's more rat-arsed than he thought. After a few moments casting about and with the threat of the barkeep whisking his drink away bearing down on him, he fishes around in his pocket for another.

Reynauld buys his drink for him, but it doesn't count because it's with the coin in question.

"Son of a—" Dismas stares at his behelmeted noggin and wonders what kind of expression he's wearing under there. He can't stop his grin. "Where'd you learn that trick?"

"In a different life." Reynauld sounds halfway amused himself. It's charming, in a way. Dismas wonders if he were ever caught filching from the collection plate. "Tell me. What was your calling before turning to brigandry?"

"Butcher, baker, candlestick maker... what does it matter now?"

"Mere curiosity on my part."

Dismas laughs and knocks back his drink. "Well, my sticky-fingered friend, I've curiosities of my own you can satisfy. Come on, how do you fancy our chances? Ten to one suit you? Have a flutter on our battered little souls."

"Grotesque," Reynauld says. "I'll not take your wager."

Dismas spins his new coin and watches it bump its way over the scarred bartop, falter, and then come to rest flat. A head with no body, a judgemental eye glaring up at him.

"Yeah, all right," he says and turns the coin over. "House does always win, I suppose. And I've not known one as greedy as this."

The sky is a surly grey that might pass for daytime if it were ever truly day here. Dismas assumes the sun has forsaken the hamlet entirely. Frankly, he can't blame it, even if it's left the becursed place inhabiting some darkling hour that sits outside of normal time or sense. It feels like he hasn't slept in a year.

The hamlet's gambrel rooftops fade into the ever-present mist, and the ruins await them, perched upon the craggy cliffs: cyclopean stone and cracked shadows, broken arches and tracery, rusted spindles of ironwork like needle teeth, its hundred dark windows staring unblinking as they approach. Time and ill fortune has ravaged the once stately home, and now all that remains is decay and squalor and a transfixing, oppressive presence.

His stomach is irritated, the pale slice of healed skin there aching and tight. He wants to scratch it. Instead he touches a hand to the butt of his flintlock and the hilt of his dirk, but it's too much like easing a compulsion to offer any comfort.

The air is saturated with an ice-cold fog that soaks through his breeches and weighs down the fur collar of his coat. Fresh as a dewdrop it is not. It has a taste. It is not a nice taste. Dismas tugs his kerchief tighter, for all the good it will do. The filtered-through-dirt taste permeates everything around here. The land is poisoned and wasting, choked with lichen, fungus, slime mould, leafless hardwood, but there are no birds or animals except for the odd haze of mosquitos. The very air is sick. It seeps into his lungs like stagnant water.

From Alhazred, a curious, contemplative noise as he observes the gnarled surroundings. His robes are heavy brocaded silk and filthy with muck. If they're all mad for being here, Dismas decides that this fellow is the maddest. He casts a glance at Reynauld, who by all appearances is doing his best to pretend he's not developing an ulcer.

He halts them on the stone steps that have been wrested out of place by prying ivy, before the once-grand entrance that's now a beckoning maw. Dismas had guessed him an infantryman—just one of a battalion of tabards and helms, mindlessly smiting unbelievers because that's what they've been told to do—but here he has an air of command that suggest he was off the mark. Reynauld's stance suggests complete control of the space around him, as though he hadn't torn screaming out of this very doorway only a few days ago. Dismas finds himself admiring his poise even as he feels the itch of insubordination. If he starts barking orders things'll get contentious.

But Reynauld draws his greatsword and sets his torch ablaze, and all he says is, "The Light be our vanguard. May it bless us all."

The bastards get the pounce on them in the dead-end of the eastern hall: two of those godforsaken madmen in robes and pitted iron claws, a skeletal thrall in rotting velvet prancing around them in macabre parody of a courtier. There is no reasoning where they sprang from. These things, they find their way in the dark with no simple human predictability, their minds slanted along an axis that no sane man should hope to understand.

Dismas' first shot misses. Reynauld ploughs into them, shoulders straining under the arc of his sword; a head topples and so does the torch. It lands in the cultist's dark spreading blood and is doused with a hiss.

The body slumps to its knees, twitching, and in the instant before the shapeless dark envelops them, Dismas sees its claws slide beneath Reynauld's tassets, hears his grunt of pain. Junia yells, thrusting her mace to the heavens, but a bright light is as blinding as pitch black.

Dismas curses freely and at length, hunched down on the cold stone floor and reloading his pistol by feel, blazing afterimages dancing before his eyes. It stinks of wet earth down here, and tangy, sticky blood. The clatter of bones echoes in his ears.

"Come on, you whoreson, you useless—" His fingers move frantically: tamp the shot, prime the pan, set to full cock—

Alhazred's magic splits the air with an unsettling bloody glow, illuminating the tableau of battle in ghastly flickers. The courtier has Junia by the cowl, her head yanked back and neck distressingly bare. Sanguine liquid flows into her mouth from the creature's goblet, spilling down her chin and staining her vestments.

Wide-eyed, she thrashes and gurgles.

No second chance for this.

Dismas lunges, jams his pistol into the cursed thing's empty eyesocket and fires. Its leering face disintegrates. A blowback of bone splinters and gunpowder stings his face. Junia staggers back, panting, and there's a triumphant moment where Dismas dares think they've prevailed.

In the moment immediately following, his left side erupts in a searing agony.

The remaining cultist yanks his claws out of him and tosses him aside, sends his pistol and dirk in one direction and him in another, skidding into something soft that yields wetly under his hands when he tries and fails to get up again.

Alhazred chants some unspeakable words not meant for human ears. The air throbs with magic. It stitches Dismas closed and rips him open somewhere else instead. It's terrible and noble and pointless, and it's left him wide open. The cultist snarls. Both of Alhazred's skulls crack on the stone.

Whites of her eyes flashing, Junia lands a reckless blow across the cultist's shoulders. It barely fazes him. It barely fazes her either. Her eyes are bright and glittering and her lips are flecked with bloody froth, invocations rising out of her in crazed ululations.

Movement from the shadows. Reynauld regaining his feet. He staggers over, sword dragging, and barges shoulder-first into the cultist. They go over together, and the last thing Dismas sees is Junia raising her mace to bring it swinging back down.

He jerks back to consciousness with his cheek stinging, just in time to catch Reynauld's arm before he can lay another on him. A peal of pain rings through him, settling like ice in his back teeth and needles in his joints. There's no ungiving metal under his grip but there is stiff leather and clammy skin, and the texture of the hair on Reynauld's forearm.

"Thank the Light," Reynauld mutters.

Dismas lets go of him, blinking to try and focus his vision, but it's almost too dark to see. The only illumination is the wan moonlight that's fought its way through the manor's filthy windows. It is no match for the baleful shadows of this place.

This place. Still in here. A cold stab of desperation sets him struggling.

"No—egads, man, don't sit up. That's nothing you want to see."

The air stinks of blood. Moving has set his abdomen alight. Dismas wants to roll around and make awful noises. "Not too enthused about feeling it either," he says from between gritted teeth. "Christ's nails."

He is reclined on something unpleasantly soft. His stomach lurches, but a fumbling exploration tells him it's only an abandoned traveller's haversack, full of decaying leaves and slugs. His eyes are finally adjusting, and after some disorientation he figures out they're huddled in the shadowy recess of the hall's vast fireplace, a bookcase dragged and tipped over its mouth.

There is just enough room for the two of them.

"Junia?" he asks.

Reynauld lets out a low, long breath and stares off who knows where. "Such madness that took her," he says after a moment, and nothing more. Then he busies himself with something out of Dismas' field of view; there's the jangle of a belt buckle and the soft draw of leather against cloth, but Dismas can't find the wherewithal to sate any curiosity over what he's up to, much less move.

He closes his eyes and tries to ground himself in his body, but finds it's not wholly useful to dwell on how he is so much flesh, a sloshing bag of sinew and snot and ivory bones, gristle and fat, blue and purple viscera and ten pints of blood, only more like eight at the moment judging by the sticky puddle he's lying in.

Reynauld looms over him. "Where do you hurt most urgently?"

"I don't know." Dismas turns his face to the shadowy space behind his visor. "My heart? Feels like 'twas struck a blow."

A snort. "Your liver, more is likely."

Reynauld's hands work at the buckles of his jerkin, slowly and methodically separating the damaged leather from his soaked shirt. The air is damp and chill and Reynauld's hands are no better, cold and clammy as they work his chest bare. Each shift of fabric brings torment anew. "I stopped your bleeding, but that was triage," he says, just as steadily, then makes a low noise under his breath. Dismas' shirt makes a tearing sound coming unstuck from his skin. "Feh. I don't like his magic."

"Well, you don't have to worry about that any more."

"Feh," Reynauld says again, lower and softer. "I liked him. I liked them."

Dismas swallows and rolls his head to the side. "Yeah," he says.

Reynauld's gauntlets are heaped in the corner. There's blood on them, bright against the smooth metal, darkening where it's gathered thickly in the articulated joints. His bare palms rest on Dismas' ribcage, his fingers spread over the slat of his bones and his fingertips brushing white pain. With lightheaded certainty, he knows what's happened. His side was knitted up, but Alhazred's magic split him open along the fresh new scar on his belly in the process.

He's got an inkling of what's about to come.

"I needed you awake for this. Invoking the Light's cauterising Flame will be demanding upon a body a second time in so few days." Reynauld sounds alarmingly matter-of-fact about all this. "It wouldn't be wise to perform it on an unconscious man, lest it undo him with finality."

"That's definitely the kind of thing I wanted to hear," Dismas says. "Thank you for your honesty."

"You're welcome," Reynauld says without a trace of sarcasm, and doubles over his belt. "Bite down on this."

Once Dismas had snapped his shinbone in a hold-up gone awry, and one of his boys had set and splinted it there at the roadside without so much as a swig of moonshine to take the edge off. His pride had demanded he forgo the belt that time, and he had regretted it considerably.

He bites down.

If that first healing at Reynauld's hands was a warm anointment, then this one is being cast into a frigid, roaring ocean. Dismas' spine snaps into an arc as Reynauld's touch sears through him. He loses the belt right away.

"Hush," Reynauld hisses. "Shh! Dismas! You will bring them all down upon us!"

There is light behind his eyes even though they're squeezed closed. It's inside him, burning him hollow with its cold flame. It's like being filled with overproof liquor, heat so intense it feels like ice. Reynauld's hand is over his mouth. His pulse beats in his throat and groin and in his squirming wounded skin as it knits, until suddenly he is whole again, and there's nowhere for his agonies to go.

He bucks and twists. Reynauld's hand goes to his hip, pinning him down, the other still smothering his mouth, warmed by his breath and tasting of blood and dirt.

Nothing for it. Dismas comes, right here in the rot and mould and his own blood, his hips jerking under Reynauld's steadying grip. It jackknifes him upright and he clutches at Reynauld's surcoat, gasping into it as he's wracked from head to toe. Somewhere he can hear the constant patter of water, loud like drumming hooves. Everything is too loud, too immediate. Even the anaemic moonlight is too bright. Dismas' breath sounds like a desperate panting to his ears. His heart is mutinying and won't calm itself, and while he could probably manage to let go of Reynauld's surcoat, he doesn't. The hem of it is sodden. The tang of fresh blood is heavy on the air, and under it, the scent of fear-sweat and spend.

"Tis the stress of it," Reynauld says. He sounds oddly distant. The hand that was over Dismas' mouth is curled around his shoulder now, not quite cradling him.

Little privacy in the boarding house, and the hamlet's environs hardly lend themselves to titillating thoughts, even if his mind has wandered twice or thrice to what Reynauld might have locked up beneath his chausses.

Had it coming, really. As it were.

Slowly, his senses unsharpen, and he finds he can breathe more evenly. His limbs stop shuddering enough to tell that Reynauld is shuddering along with him.

"Take it out of you too, does it?" Dismas says. He sounds like he's swallowed a caltrop.

Reynauld nudges him, encouraging him to uncurl from his dead-spider scrunch. "I am poured out like water," he says, "and all my bones are out of joint. I miss the warmth of the sun on my face."

He groans and slumps back to sit splay-legged against the wall. In the filmy light Dismas can see the state of his tassets. Blood has clotted along the edge and glistens wetly in the links of his chainmail. Dismas runs a cautious finger over the sticky mess, and Reynauld shudders anew. If he'd been pronged in a lifevein he'd already be dead, and while Dismas is no physick, it's clear to him that Reynauld is in need of some tending. He ferrets out some bandages and some herbs he doesn't entirely trust, but he has more faith in them than whatever corruption the cultist might've stuck Reynauld in the thigh with.

"Could try taking that stewpot off your head now and again," he says, mashing the herbs into a poultice.

"Why? There is no sun here."

"Get some fresh air, then."

"In this foul crypt?"

"It might not be the freshest but it beats a London particular by a long mile. Hold still, I need to get this off you. Tss! Keep still, I said."

The buckles of Reynauld's tassets are slippery with blood and Dismas fumbles with them in vain. Frustrated, he draws his boot-knife and slides it under the leather straps, sawing through them as gently as he can while Reynauld alternates between pained hissing and rueful sighs over the damage being wrought 'pon his armour.

"It's no good to you whole if you're dead."

"Nor is it any use to me in pieces."

"You're no use in pieces."

Reynauld seems disinclined to further his argument and lapses into sour grumbling. It's appreciated.

Dismas folds the chainmail aside and after some cajoling, gets some assistance in easing off the man's breeches. There are two oozing puncture wounds beneath, black blood eddying up, the surrounding flesh hot to the touch. Nowhere to wash his hands, so he slathers on the medicinal herbs and hopes for the best as he binds the wound tight, conscious the whole time of how close his bowed head is to Reynauld's uncovered crotch. His jerkin hangs open and he is still feeling thrills from his orgasm, strange little jolts of euphoria that leave him lightheaded and craving—something. More touch, more physicality, heat and a pounding heart. The rush of life. Proof of living. That's the best he can explain it.

Reynauld's bare thigh is strong and muscled and scarred, smattered with dark hair, smeared with blood, and Dismas kisses it.

A clang resonates through the eerie halls, Reynauld's helm striking the brickwork as he jerks to attention.

"Shh," Dismas says, trying to stifle a panicked laugh. He expects Reynauld to shove him away with some rebuke on his lips or lines of verse, but instead he grabs at Dismas' hair. O, holy night. It's too short-cropped for him to get good purchase so Dismas lets him push him about, nuzzling into the dark hair curling at his groin when he's guided to it. He seeks the hot flesh hardening there, and Reynauld lets out such a guttural noise when Dismas gets his mouth on him he wonders if he's suffered another injury.

He pulls back, but Reynauld's hips rise in pursuit, his cock jutting amid folds of surcoat and chainmail, tip glistening in the meagre light.

Yeah, he's all right. Dismas runs his fingers up his straining length, spreading the gathered wetness about the crown, savouring every jerk and shudder that gets out of him.

"Not bad, holy man," he says, but Reynauld only grunts, his fingers tightening in his hair. All right then. Dismas ducks his head and drags his tongue up the pounding underside of his cock, then sucks the head into his mouth. It's been a while, and though it's not something one forgets, Reynauld, imposing fellow that he is, would be a challenge even if he were in good practise. The man makes another pained noise and his fingers curl against the back of Dismas' head. Fast, low words spill out of him, too hushed to travel beyond their hiding spot.

Is he praying? Dismas isn't certain what to make of that, but whatever convolutions get him off. There's a task at hand that needs more of his focus than figuring out which psalm is his stroke verse.

He bobs his head, rubbing Reynauld's cock against the roof of his mouth, then angling to slip the length of him as deep as he can without striking his throat too dangerously. He runs his fist over the inches he can't manage to take down and bobs his head in time, spit running down the back of his hand. His jaw begins to ache in short order, and Dismas is caught between a hope that he'll come soon, and a desperate yearning to keep this going as long as he can. This is the most Reynauld has ever shown of himself.

"Take me to you," Reynauld mutters, his fingers stroking the back of Dismas' head, "imprison me, for I, I—"

His cock pulses heavily in Dismas' mouth and he groans. Did his holy vows require he abstain from such things? Seems like it from the power of his orgasm and the quantity he spills—does the fellow not even attend himself? If that's a sin, then firstly Dismas hasn't a hope in the world, and secondly lord knows what he must think he's doing right now. Perhaps he is struck a grievous injury after all. Just to his soul instead of his body.

A mortal blow, one might say. Dismas swallows before he can sputter and make an awful mess of things.

Reynauld's gone lax, his chest rising and falling with his deep breaths, though Dismas has the impression he's being watched most intently from behind the safety of that infernal helm. On a whim, Dismas slides a hand up his neck, working his fingers beneath the rim of his helm to touch him. He finds overheated skin slippy with sweat, a thick beard, a sighing mouth. It's tempting to imagine what he might look like under there. What sort of face goes with that solemn manner and condescension, and those brawny thighs?

Reynauld tucks his chin, pinching Dismas' hand between the edge of his helm and his chest until he curses and tugs himself free.

"Have some decorum," he says.

"Oh, rebalance your humours. I'm not the one with my tallywhacker hanging out my britches, am I."

His tone contains equal measures of mirth and scorn, but even as Dismas needles he hopes Reynauld isn't taking it to heart. Reynauld does gingerly cover himself up, but otherwise seems more fatigued than embarrassed.

"We should make camp proper." His voice, usually with gravel to it, sounds like a mined-out quarry. "Take care not to draw attention. Build the fire in the far corner of the hearth. Keep the flames low so we are not made targets by its light. Smoke is no concern, the flue has a good draw on it."

As though Dismas isn't accustomed to operating under cover, even if were usually for more ambushy purposes. He gives him the cock of an eyebrow. "Flue's not the only thing, wouldn't you say?"

He is graced with a snort for a response, and so sets about kindling the fire with a grin.

They hadn't brought much in the way of fuel, perhaps enough for an hour of warmth. Dangerous to weigh down their haversacks and dangerous to stay in one place too long. The books on the case are thick, their spines embossed with words that refuse to be read, but combustible enough, Dismas warrants; if they have to hole up here for a while, they'll do, trusting they won't unleash some ghastly curse or other on their destruction.

He sets a pot upon the fire once it's crackling and warms up some of the rations, though he can't rightly call it cooking, particularly as the content of the tinned stuff is mysterious: chicken gizzards and goat trimmings at best guess, suspended in a lubricious aspic the colour of old teeth. His stomach folds itself up in a hunger pang even as it objects to the smell of the stuff. It's a challenge to slop it into a dish, its texture akin to a springtime pond, but at length he prevails and hands it to Reynauld, who prods it suspiciously then holds it up to the slats of his visor, inspecting it closely, or sniffing it, or both.

He swiftly moves it a tentative distance from himself. "... do we have cheese and bread, perhaps?"

Dismas shows him the condition of the cheese and he wisely demurs. Resigned to the lesser of two evils, the visor comes inching up, just enough to cautiously spoon the frightful stuff inside. Dismas catches a glimpse of dark beard and what might've been an aristocratic nose if it hadn't been badly-set once upon a time. Dismas can commiserate.

"Perhaps I should have blessed that meal," Reynauld says a little later, both of them huddled up to the fire. If night could be discerned in this twilight place, it was by a precipitous drop in the ambient temperature.

"Exorcised it, you mean."

So far they have not discussed the following things: dying, not dying, their companions dying, how they're going to survive the night without dying, the sex, what the sex means, if anything, and whether more of it is on the cards if they make it out of here without succumbing to the aforementioned dying.

What they have mostly talked about is whether the food will kill them before the revenants do.

Dismas hands Reynauld the stale heel of a loaf, which he pulls off in tufts and feeds into his helm with eucharistic solemnity. Their shoulders are pressed warm together, companionable. Not the self-flagellation he had expected. Easy to think it's because he'll head to the abbey and park his arse on a shriving pew, read a few verses he was going to read anyway, and thus magically be absolved. Seems to be how it works for these God-fearing sorts, but then—if it were all that straightforward, he suspects Reynauld wouldn't have come to the hamlet in the first instance.

"I once knew a man," he says, as Reynauld gives up on his tearing and gnaws his way through the last of the crust. "A thief, he was. Been sent to the rope, only the night before a storm ripped through the town and tore up the gallows. So they flung a noose over a dule tree branch and went to hang him there, only they'd just got him hitched up there and, crack! The branch broke. So then they put the rope 'round his neck and tied the other end to a horse and slapped the horse's rump, but the horse dug in its heels and refused to spook for nothing. The executioner declared it divine providence, and the governor agreed, handed the man a pardon just like that. In that moment, the man swore to turn his life around. To find purpose in it. To do right by people."

"That man was you," Reynauld says.

He sounds so sure of himself, the idealistic sod. If Dismas'd had his kerchief pulled up he might've smiled.

"That man," he continues, "was starved. Couldn't eat coming up to gala day, you know, his own death hanging over his head like that, so the first thing he did in his new life was head to a tavern and get himself a square meal. Gobbled it down so fast he choked to death on a chicken bone."

He snickers and takes a bite from an apple. It's mealy and soft.

Reynauld doesn't laugh. He's silent some time, mulling this sad tale over. His bare hands run along the spine of the book in his lap: a volume of holy blatherings he'd fetched from his haversack but has yet to crack open, having been content enough listening to Dismas' yarning instead.

"And the moral of this tale?" he ventures.

"Moral?" Dismas says.

After another, briefer silence, Reynauld says, "... I'll take first watch."

"No need for that."

With a tug and a jangle, Dismas frees a length of chain from his pack. It's strung with bells, larger than the kind you might find on a jester's cap but just as irritating. If tripped, it will rouse a light enough sleeper, and he is nothing if not a light sleeper.

Reynauld's stance suggests scepticism.

"We can sleep an hour each and be out of here in two, or we can sleep an hour together and get out of this godless place in half the time," Dismas reasons to himself as much as to anyone, and tosses Reynauld his bedroll.

Dismas swears he can feel every crack and join of the tile floor through his groundcloth, and an insidious draft plagues him through his blanket. He uses his coat as a pillow, the matted fur at least halfway comfortable. Reynauld settles behind him, back to back but not quite touching.

The fire smoulders, its red embers kicking up long shadows that dance in the fireplace's hollow. It almost feels safe enough to sleep with the knight's presence at his back, but his toes are freezing and his ears strain constantly in the echoing silence, conjuring whispers that jerk him into wakefulness whenever he teeters on the brink of slumber, or what he swears is the distant tune of a waltz. But exhaustion wins in the end, and he wades into surface dreams that are like memories, or memories straining to become dreams, terrible in their simplicity, irresistible in their truth. He is hooking his fingers into the bulletholes and pulling open the coach door, about to be delivered his reward.

He starts awake yet again and the air is blue and black; he's slept long enough that the fire's burned out to nothing. It's so cold his breath is manifesting, but his back and palms are filmed in sweat. One of his legs has gone to sleep, so at least someone around here is getting some rest. Muffling a groan, he rolls over to numb his other hip instead, and to tuck his hands against Reynauld's warm back.

Not long after that, Reynauld rolls himself over, too. Dismas refuses to believe he sleeps in full armour as a matter of course and that he's merely responding to his environment, and so doesn't take offense when he reaches for his face and his hands meet the usual pitted dome of his helm.

He drums his fingers on it.

"If a fiend happens upon us, he shan't take my head with a single blow," Reynauld whispers.

That is too much innuendo to deal with, and Dismas is tired. "Fair 'nuff. Me, I'm just taking my chances," he says.

Reynauld's leg shifts. Their ankles entwine, their calves. Reynauld's gauntlets are still heaped in a corner; the hand that slips into the rend in Dismas's jerkin and works its way under the stiff fabric of his shirt is blood-warm.

That answers a few questions, but presents yet more.

"Aren't you supposed to smite the wicked?" Dismas asks.

"Do you think yourself a wicked man, Dismas?"

"Confiteor." Dismas runs his thumb over Reynauld's visor. He could slip his fingers into its openings like they were bulletholes. "The worst you can imagine."

"You cannot know what I imagine," Reynauld says in a low murmur, his voice avalanching through Dismas' body, pressing himself in tight as he is. "Such things I have seen wrought by the hands of men, by my own hand, justified in the name of the divine. No, my friend, your sins are trifling."

"Even this one?" Dismas walks his fingers up Reynauld's thigh, over the bandages wadded in his breeches, beneath the weight of chainmail, to the burgeoning swell of his erection. The wicked ensnared by the work of his hands.

Reynauld takes a sharp breath. "What are such things in the shadow of these walls? To compare it to the aberrations of nature that haunt these wretched arcades, the blasphemies... it pales. It is nothing."

Dismas had anticipated madness cloaked in the language of faith, but perhaps biting the proverbial fruit is its own shade of madness where Reynauld's concerned. And for him, like as could be. Certainly this is not the place for such intimacies. Still, calling it nothing is a knock to his pride, and he's not one to let that kind of thing stand. He digs the heel of his hand hard against Reynauld's cock, impulsively unkind and yet trying to be mindful of his injuries, but Reynauld seizes him with eagerness, grunting when he rolls them over and Dismas' knee smacks his wounded thigh.

"You fit for this, mate?" As if being manhandled astride him with nary a warning wasn't indicative enough.

"Don't concern yourself," Reynauld says impatiently, and pulls him down by the hips, fitting them together as best he can. They're odd shapes, the pair of them, not made for straightforwardness: Reynauld a cypher under his righteous dictum and dented armour, and Dismas—well, he is what he is.

And a flood of endorphins is always good to take the edge off. Couldn't begrudge him it, what with having had a post-skirmish wank on more than one occasion, blood spiking and adrenaline like a honed edge, everything sharp and intense and him unable to get out of his skin enough to calm it. Sometimes he'd dig his finger into the slit of a wound, and he'd be so het up the pain would transmute into something close enough to pleasure that it had him spilling barefaced in the backwoods, beautifully alive.

Could be the case here. He rises with each of Reynauld's thrusts, riding the powerful jerks of his hips, a hand braced on his broad chest and the other steadying himself against the hearth wall lest he is bucked clean off him. It's easily the oddest lay he's had even discounting his surroundings, staring down at the slit in Reynauld's visor as they fervently grind against each other, wondering if he's gazing up at him just the same or if he has his eyes screwed shut with the disgrace of it all.

Whatever his feelings, his cock is a hard thick column of heat that Dismas wants to rut frantically against, and his own cock throbs longingly at each hard press of contact, each long satisfying drag of friction. There's a crisp peeling nose with each shove and rise and slide of their limbs, tacky blood from Reynauld's wounds seeping through bandages and wool and coating the leather of his breeches.

He slips a hand to the inside of his leg, testing a theory with a gentle prod at his wound. It bears out; Reynauld gasps and strains under Dismas's body, clutching at his hips and thighs, every pulse of his orgasm described with lucid clarity against Dismas' cock even through however many layers of clothing. It's astonishingly obscene, and he's distracted by it thoroughly enough that Reynauld finds the presence of mind to run a hand inside his ruined jerkin and thumb at his nipples. Dismas buckles under the attention, breath snatched out of his lungs as he follows him to climax.

Reynauld manages to cover his mouth at the last moment so his cry doesn't go echoing down the hallways. Dismas' sweat drips onto his helm in tinny patters.

He closes his eyes and kisses his palm, and pretends it could be his mouth. It's not a particularly good idea, he knows, and when Reynauld's response is to slip his hand to his jaw and cradle his face, to slowly brush his thumb over his cheekbone like he's unearthing something precious, he wonders if it was actually a pretty damn terrible one, in fact.

They manage to drag their carcasses back to the hamlet, battered and ailing but alive. The first shot of liquor hits Dismas like a primed charge and next thing he knows he's face-down in his boarding-house bunk, whimpering for mercy and a fried breakfast, or at least a glass of water.

Once his stomach settles, he fishes out his journal and attempts to chronicle their sortie into the ruins. What he produces is a noctuary of horrors, so he slaps it shut with the ink still wet and shoves it under his pillow. There comes a point when a man has to put his foot down and say: that's enough. If rest is its own victory, then Dismas will rise triumphant and spend the next week dead to the world. So to speak.

It'd be a rather fine thing for Reynauld to join him in this self-imposed respite, and self-imposed this-and-thats are his custom after all, so he slopes off to the abbey to see what he's up to. He's cloistered away, leaving Dismas to prowl the shadowy garth and be unseemly about commanding his attention when he finally appears to sit and attempt to read his versebook on the lone rusting bench.

Dismas plonks down next to him. Feels like the wrought-iron thing hasn't seen a ray of sunshine in a hundred years. "God's teeth, that's cold on my arse," he says. "Hello."

"Do not take the Lord's name in vain," Reynauld chides, but it doesn't sound like his heart's in it.

"I promise you he's not listening to the likes of me."

"Perhaps because nothing but filth and blasphemy comes out of your mouth."

Back in his usual fettle then. Lovely, lovely, he does like a good round of bickering. Dismas chuckles and leans back, hands shoved deep in his pockets to keep them warm. He lets his legs splay, his knee touching Reynauld's armoured one.

"Here is not the place."

Of course he's just being friendly, but anything that puts a bit of fire into Reynauld's voice. Dismas grins. "Neither was that house of horrors, but Deus vult and all that."

Rather than indulging in further tit-for-tat, Reynauld gains something of a harrowed air. He shifts away, lapsing into a judgemental silence.

"Just saying." Dismas feels his smile fade.

"What's done is done and can't be undone."

Ah, Dismas thinks. Aha. Haha. He lets out a long breath and tips his head back to stare at the bland yellow sky. What a precious triple donkey he's made of himself here. "But let me guess. It can be repented for," he says.

Reynauld bows his head; not quite a nod, more like his helm is too heavy for him all of a sudden. Horribly, Dismas remembers that the abbey has a penance chamber.

"Thank you for understanding," he says.

"Bollocks to that," Dismas mutters under his breath.

"Beg pardon?"

"I said 'bollocks to that'." Dismas stands. "Walk with me, Reynauld."

"Whither are we bound?"

"Not the destination, 'tis the journey."

"Feh. The tavern, then." And with that he's dismissed, Reynauld turning his attention to his versebook.

"No, not the tavern," Dismas says, "and I know what you think I'm thinking—not the bathhouse either, nor where I bunk. Clear enough to me that the only place you think God can't watch your fornications is up in that hellpit. No, come on. You've been shut up in this abbey for days and I've missed your tin-can face. Come for a constitutional 'round the hamlet. I'll let you lead the way."

Reynauld's shoulders hunch. "Leave me alone," he says. "I'm trying to read."

"You've read all that a hundred times if you've read it once."

"I said leave me be."

"The stagecoach brought fresh cheese. We could wheedle flour from the granary and—"

"I said leave me be." Reynauld slaps his book closed and rises. "I have bruised my knees upon the abbey's stone floor and flayed the trespasses from my soul. My back is split with the Light's forgiveness. Please." What Dismas had taken for irritation is now more clearly panic. His voice shakes with it. "Please. I'll not have you undo it all."

At first light, Reynauld collects three tenderfeet fresh off the stagecoach and makes for the manor.

"Whenever I stop," he says, when Dismas grabs him by the surcoat and makes him explain himself, "I am reminded of that thing within me, the part of me that has always cherished the Light, and though I should have no lust for violence, I know that I must continue to fight if I am to defend it. I am here for a reason, Dismas, and it is to hold the Light's Flame aloft, to be a beacon of righteousness in an ever-encroaching darkness. Not to satisfy your—your whims."

My, but he is a man of magnificent hypocrisies. "That's not what you said when I had your dick in my mouth," Dismas says, but somehow that doesn't persuade him to stay.

The days are wintry-cold though the sky gives up nothing more than a miserable sleet that churns the streets into mud. The stagecoach comes and goes, delivering the foolhardy and the foolish alike into the hamlet's thrall.

Dismas recuperates. Does his laundry. Cleans his pistol. Whets the blade of his dirk and neatens his hair with it, but doesn't bother with his face. Drinks, whores, reads a book. It is not a very good book. Drinks some more. He dreams of waltzing night sweats, remains in a shallow grave, a greatsword thrust through a helm.

After four days of being friendly but distant to every newcomer the carriage brings, the possibility that Reynauld may not return from the ruins becomes impossible to avoid, and he channels the resultant despair into anger. The guild gives him some outlet for it, but his purse is light and his desperation ongoing. He instead entertains himself by tossing his dice outside the tavern, crouched in the shadowy lee and sheltered from the icy mizzle by its low eaves.

No chance of a win playing against himself, but nothing to lose either.

He hears a clank in his periphery, but there have been other knights off the coach. His dice land snake eyes. Dismas gathers them up again, gives them a shake and a blow between his cupped hands, for luck. Only then does he dare to glance up.

He recognises the purple surcoat, even torn and fraying as it is and soaked in lord knows what. The face above it is less familiar, but... familiar. Gaunt and drawn, hollow cheeks sheened in sweat, a hard mouth in a full dark beard. Eyes with all sorts of sorrows in them.

For some reason Dismas had thought Reynauld somewhat older than him. Not that either of them are spring chickens, the grey creeping in at their temples as it is, but looks like they're about the same age after all. Maybe it's his bearish stature made him think it, or the air of grandiosity. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. He made it out. He's here.

Dismas settles back onto his heels and looks at him for a long moment, then sucks on his teeth like a knacker examining a lame horse.

"Just you, is it?"

Reynauld manages to stay impassive for a moment longer, then his mouth bows down and his brow furrows. He nods.

Dismas rises at the same time as Reynauld careens into him, several hundred pounds of bulk and armour and zeal pinning him to the tavern's wall. There is a clarity of purpose to it, the way he curls his fingers around Dismas' chin and tilts his head, though he kisses him with a trembling restraint.

"I failed," he says, "again. Failure after abysmal failure, I—"

Dismas hushes him, tugging him in to press another kiss to that downturned mouth. There will be time for regrets later, for the lamenting and self-recrimination and all that, but a narrow alley between the tavern and the sanitarium's towering walls is not the place for it. Here is a liminal space where the shadows are benign, and in it he kisses Reynauld like he'd kiss a lover, gracelessly and with fervour.

And maybe that's how it'll be with him. No strolling arm in arm about town, but closeness stolen from the moments after a tragedy, in places neither god nor the devil can touch. It's a hard old road on the way to redemption and everyone's journey is different; where one man finds respite, another finds a roadblock.

Or perhaps a hump, in a manner of speaking. Dismas finds himself hitched against the brickwork, strong hands in the crook of his knees lifting him. He clutches at Reynauld's shoulders and wraps his legs about his thick waist, hooking his ankles together in the small of his back and pulling their bodies close.

It has the desired effect. Reynald gasps, his mouth softening from its grim sorrow, his kiss growing recklessly deeper, tongue slipping over Dismas', teeth tugging ungently at his lower lip. It sends jolts of pleasure to mingle dangerously with the relief that's welled in him. A curious alchemy. Feels a bit like burning up from the inside-out, a smoulder ready to catch on the tangled affection he's woven for this man. He draws back to rest his forehead against Reynauld's.

"I think," Reynauld says, his breath pluming in the cold night air, "it's not what God intended for us. To be without the comfort of another."

"I'd hope he doesn't intend that fate for anyone," Dismas says. Reynauld's beard is stiff with blood; it flakes when Dismas drags his fingers through it. "Hope he's at least that kind."

Reynauld just huffs as if he couldn't say one way or the other, and adjusts his grip on Dismas' thighs. It shifts his weight in a fashion that makes them both inhale sharply. Maddening. Dismas digs his fingers into Reynauld's neck and arches his back, shoulders pressed to the wall, and Reynauld leans into the change of subject, hips rising to meet him in a slow grind.

A light rain bursts on them, hissing against the hamlet's rooftops, but here under the eaves it's mostly dry. Dismas' coat scrapes against the bricks and catches on their rough surface as Reynauld surges against him again and again, panting and groaning, and Dismas is done for, well and truly, his head full of stars. If the estate's crawling horrors doesn't burst his heart in his chest, this is certain to.

Lord but they're fools, the pair of them, he thinks, as Reynauld nuzzles in to kiss him, warm and prayerful in the cold rain—but even if it's the physical presence of death that binds them, if one or both of them will soon be shut up in the sanitarium or buried under six feet of earth, if there's even a body to drag home. Even if it comes to that, they have this to bolster them through the night chills and the sleepless dreams, when they once again descend together into the wretched depths of the looming manor, wind through its loathsome halls and strike a path into its darkest of dungeons.