Chapter Text
Silence.
The world had been gutted.
It was not peace that lingered in the air, but something far more unnatural—a silence that reeked of death, a hush so absolute it pressed against the skin like damp cloth over a corpse’s face. No birds cried. No wind stirred the branches. No distant trains howled. Even the earth seemed to hold its breath, as though afraid to move and wake the nightmare.
Andrew could not breathe. Sweat poured from his brow in thin rivulets, soaking his collar, crawling down his spine like the touch of cold, dead fingers. His knees ached from where he knelt, locked atop the horror that pulsed beneath him. The silver letter opener trembled in his grasp like a divining rod gone mad, slick with something dark. His fingers were cramping, but he couldn’t let go—not yet. Not while it still looked at him.
His entire body quaked as if possessed, and his breath came in tiny, panicked gasps. Every time he blinked, the scene changed—just slightly. Was Richard closer? Were the shadows moving? Was Orpheus still alive? His husband lay only a few feet away, writhing weakly, a monstrous gurgle rising from his throat, froth and blood bubbling over his lips like he were drowning in his own lungs.
But Andrew couldn’t move. Couldn’t help. Couldn’t scream.
Underneath him, Richard smiled.
That smile—God. It was wrong. Too wide. Too knowing. Too calm. His face was splashed with blood as though he had been born from it, and his eyes, those gleaming obsidian pits, stared straight into Andrew’s soul and dug.
“Andrew,” he breathed the name like a curse made beautiful. It drifted through the silence like perfume from a crypt. “What is it you desire?”
His voice was velvet soaked in rot. His lips, stained with Orpheus’ life, curled slowly, lovingly, into a shape that suggested both adoration and devourment. Andrew's heart slammed against his ribs like an animal desperate to flee the cage of his chest.
“I—sh-shut up!” Andrew’s voice cracked, broken and trembling. It was barely louder than a whisper. “Just—shut up! Please! Y-you monster —you’re not real, this isn’t—this isn’t real!”
His vision swam. The blood glistened like oil. The walls pulsed like living flesh. The sharp edge of the letter opener hovered against Richard’s throat, but it was Andrew whose life hung suspended. His teeth chattered, and his entire frame was wracked with the kind of fear that makes people chew through their own tongues just to stop feeling.
“Look what you did !” he wailed, the words collapsing under their own weight. His voice came out as more of a sob than a sound. “You’ve destroyed everything—I-I had a life—he was my—he was—!”
His final cry dissolved into raw-throated anguish as blood and spit sprayed Richard’s angelic face.
And still—he laughed.
A gurgling, too-wet, delighted laugh that rolled from his chest like a hymn from some abyssal chapel. Richard’s eyes glittered with something unholy. He licked his lips slowly, smearing the red, like a man savoring the final bite of a sacred feast.
“Me?” he purred, fangs peeking through the blood. “ Darling Andrew… I didn’t lift a finger.”
He tilted his head, eyes cutting to the carnage around them—Orpheus choking, the walls splashed with arterial scripture, the silence so thick it screamed.
“This masterpiece…” Richard said reverently, as if marveling at a painting in a forgotten gallery.
“…was all you .”
—
“My beloved Andrew,” Orpheus sighed, exhaling a long ribbon of smoke that curled through the air, fragrant and thick. The tendrils twisted like ghostly fingers, mimicking the gentle steam rising from a pie left too long on a windowsill, but there was nothing warm in the scent. It was herbal, yes—rich, aged, and unsettlingly familiar. It clung to Andrew’s lungs each time he breathed it in. It was the smell of Orpheus.
“I’m trusting these tasks to you,” his husband murmured, voice smooth as polished marble. “Remember, we have a grand party at the end of the month.”
Andrew shifted his awkward, too-long legs in the confines of the carriage. The space was stiflingly small, cramped like a coffin made for two. He would never mention the discomfort, of course. One didn’t complain about gifts from one’s benefactor, no matter how ill-fitting. His arms folded delicately in his lap—his posture straight, hands composed— desperately proper. He tried not to flinch each time the wheels jostled over a rock and the glowing setting sunlight pierced the threadbare curtains. The entire carriage seemed to breathe in time with Orpheus’ pipe, the thin fabric fluttering like moth wings.
“Of course, Orpheus.” Andrew’s voice was soft, smooth, correct . It was a phrase he’d said hundreds of times. It had been practiced and refined until it was no longer a thought but a reflex. “You may put your trust in me.”
“I always knew I could,” came the reply, and with it, another exhale of smoke—this time from Orpheus’ nose, slow and serpentine. “And how have you been faring with your illness lately? Shall we call the doctor again?”
The question struck a nerve, invisible but deep. Orpheus did not lift his eyes. His attention remained fixed on the glowing bowl of his pipe as if it whispered more to him than Andrew ever could.
Andrew’s smile wavered beneath the weight of his practiced calm. His throat felt dry, his stomach cramped from too many lies swallowed whole. “Do not waste your worries on me. I’m sure I’ll be better in no time. The lozenges you’ve provided are… quite acceptable.”
“Do you have them with you?”
Orpheus dipped his hand into his coat with the ease of a man searching for nothing of consequence. He drew out a gleaming tin, engraved with purple irises that shimmered slightly in the filtered sunlight. The etching was foreign—Greek, Andrew had discovered after obsessive research. The Cure of the Gods.
The words had comforted him once. No brand, he reasoned, would dare name itself such if it were harmful.
“I…” Andrew hesitated. His fingers clutched the inside of his coat where his own tin nestled, cold and hidden. “I must have forgotten them at home.”
Orpheus chuckled—soft, indulgent, as if amused by a wayward child. He handed the tin across the narrow divide. “You would be a mess without me, Andrew.”
“You are correct,” came the expected reply. “What would I do without you?”
Andrew was careful not to spill the fine cornstarch that dusted the lozenges—a pale white veil over dark, grape-colored spheres. They looked like tiny reliquaries, sweet and sacred. When he placed one on his tongue, it began to melt slowly, coating his mouth in silence.
“There you are.” Orpheus reached out and patted Andrew’s leg. The touch was brief, impersonal. “Let us hope that awful illness stays at bay.”
Andrew murmured his agreement, pressing the lozenge into his cheek with his tongue. It dulled the taste of sickness rising in his throat. His stomach burned with the familiar sourness that preceded vomiting. His body— his cursed, wan, traitorous body —was wasting. His hands were thinner by the day. He could see the bones beneath his pale skin like branches under snow.
Soon, there would be nothing left.
He had seen too many doctors. Ten? Perhaps more. All had told him the same thing: they didn’t know what plagued him. “Perhaps it is linked to your condition,” they would say, eyes flicking to his hair, to his blood-red eyes, as if those were the marks of damnation itself. “Perhaps the sun does not love you as it loves the others.”
He was rotting from the inside. And no one could stop it.
Andrew closed his eyes. His white lashes fluttered like paper moths, delicate and doomed. He focused on the lozenge—the familiar ritual. Tongue curled around it, rocking it gently from cheek to cheek. It tasted like wine diluted by rainwater. Part of him knew that Orpheus gave them not for healing—but for quiet .
He hated Andrew’s questions. Called them asinine.
But none of it mattered. Not truly.
They were married. On paper, at least. Their arrangement was one of utility, not passion. Orpheus had coin. Andrew had a name—ancient, bloodied, beautiful. Even tainted by birth, it could be paraded like a trophy.
People whispered that Andrew’s mother had taken her life in shame. He knew better. She’d died the same slow death he was now living, her own secret illness never spoken aloud. She had hidden Andrew from the world, kept him veiled in shadow. Perhaps out of love. Perhaps out of shame.
No one had seen his face in childhood. No one knew of the albino child with monster’s eyes.
No one except Orpheus.
Orpheus, who never truly kissed him. Whose lips would stop—always—a breath away. Whose smile in public was radiant, but never touched his eyes.
Andrew was a ghost draped in silk. A wraith in a golden cage.
A creature not to be seen, heard, or thought of.
It was Orpheus’ carefully curated acts of charity that were slowly ushering him into polite society—the world of trusted servants, pliant doctors, and the rare guest who could stomach the spectral presence of Andrew’s affliction without recoiling.
He was in his debt.
Twenty minutes had passed.
Andrew had already taken two lozenges, dissolving each one slowly as if prayer might follow sugar. A third beckoned from the tin, nestled beneath its veil of cornstarch—but he resisted. Orpheus disliked indulgence. He would say something sharp, lightly veiled in humor, the way he always did when Andrew clutched too tightly to his comforts.
Instead, Andrew curled his tongue along the ridges of his teeth and began counting them. It gave him something to do. Something to stave off the nausea creeping up from his stomach and gnawing at his throat like rats behind the walls.
Five more minutes.
Orpheus had turned to his newspaper, the smoke from his pipe curling in ribbons across the page. His eyes scanned each line with measured disinterest, as if nothing in the world could surprise him anymore.
Andrew moved quietly. The lid of the tin gave the softest click as he eased it open, fingers ghosting over the powder-dusted sweets. He barely touched one when a scream pierced the air—raw, sudden, human.
The tin slipped from his hand. Cornstarch exploded like dust from a broken bone, coating his lap, his sleeves, the carriage floor. He coughed once—twice—sharp and dry, his lungs rebelling against the airborne grit.
Then the carriage lurched.
Wood groaned. The wheels shrieked. Both men were thrown forward as if death itself had gripped the reins. Orpheus was the first to rise, flinging the door open and leaping into the daylight.
“What on God’s green earth is happening?!” His voice cracked with fury. “We will be late ! You could have killed us, you damned fool!”
Andrew followed slowly, brushing starch from his clothes with trembling fingers. The sunlight was too bright—everything was too loud. He stepped into the dusted road, blinking against the glare.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Blanche!” came the coachman’s voice—Murro, old and shaking. “There’s—there’s been an accident, sir! A man in the road—I didn’t see him until it was too late—”
“An accident?” Orpheus repeated, his voice cold enough to freeze blood. “You imbecile .”
Andrew drifted away from them—quietly, like smoke slipping through a crack in the door. Orpheus was still speaking, still scolding, but Andrew couldn’t hear the words anymore.
He saw white.
A spill of it across the roadside stones, too delicate, too still.
It was a body—clothed in a nightgown soaked through with blood, the fabric clinging like wet paper. Crimson had seeped into the earth, marbled the path, and splattered the tall grass like paint from a violent hand. Andrew covered his mouth, but the shock still pressed outward from his lungs.
He stepped closer.
Closer still.
Orpheus shouted behind him—his name, a command, a warning—but the voice was far away, like wind behind glass.
Andrew knelt. His fingers reached instinctively, brushing the stranger’s shoulder, turning him with terrible care. He expected the face to be mangled.
But no.
The young man’s features were untouched, save for a ribbon of blood above the brow. His hair was dark, black as crow feathers. His skin: pale, luminous, unmarred but for the wound. He looked like someone from a half-remembered dream—a figure from an oil painting, sleeping in eternal grace.
And something in Andrew’s chest twisted.
“Andrew!”
Orpheus again, louder this time. “Release that
thing
! You do not know what it carries!”
Andrew flinched.
But then—
The body breathed .
A shallow rise. A flutter beneath the ribs.
Not dead.
“O-Orpheus…” Andrew’s voice cracked like old paint. “He’s alive!”
Before Orpheus could reply, Andrew gathered the man into his arms. He was lighter than he should have been. Warm, but faintly—like a hearth grown cold overnight. Andrew stumbled, then steadied, cradling the stranger like something sacred.
“We must return. We must fetch a doctor—at once!”
Orpheus did not move.
Andrew turned back toward the carriage, breath caught in his throat, the stranger’s blood now blooming red across his sleeves like a brand.
It was clear Orpheus despised every second of it.
Though he said nothing at first, his jaw had gone tight—his mouth set in that thin, angry line he wore like a blade. The muscles in his cheek twitched with the effort of holding in words that would, no doubt, cut like knives. But what could he say? What could he do?
They both knew the truth: leaving the man to die would be a death sentence of another kind—for Orpheus' reputation, his money, his influence. The whispers would be fast and merciless.
Orpheus Blanche. The once-revered heir. Now a man who left a bleeding stranger to rot on the roadside.
There was no other option. And Andrew knew it.
“Hold onto him. Closely. ” Orpheus spat the word like it sickened him. “Murro—bring us home. Do not waste another moment’s time.”
He flung open the carriage door and, with a strangely steady hand, helped Andrew climb back inside.
The space had always been small—coffin-small—but now, with the stranger slumped in his arms, it felt like a cradle, or a crypt.
Andrew cradled the injured man on his lap, adjusting his arms carefully, reverently. Though the man was not slight by any measure, his limbs folded easily—his weight pressed against Andrew’s chest like an exhausted animal seeking shelter. His face found the crook of Andrew’s neck, lips parted just slightly, breath ghosting across Andrew’s collarbone in shallow bursts.
He held him closer.
The warmth of the stranger’s blood soaked into his clothes, spreading in slow, irregular pulses. It burned against Andrew’s skin, a stark contrast to his own cold-boned chill. It almost felt like a transfusion. Like life itself might be shared through proximity alone.
“You’ll be alright,” Andrew whispered, breath stirring the blood-matted hair. “You’ll be alright. You’ll be alright…”
The words repeated like a psalm, meant for both of them. A prayer spoken into the quiet carriage, over the rattle of wheels and the muffled curses of Orpheus outside. Andrew said it again and again, as if repetition might make it true.
You.
Me.
Both of us. Still breathing.
He dared not look at Orpheus again—not yet. He knew what he’d see: disgust, perhaps. Fury. Or worse, a cold, unreadable mask that would stretch across his face like frost over glass. No—better to stay here, folded in the warmth of another dying thing.
The man’s blood seeped slowly through Andrew’s shirt. It stuck their bodies together like a second skin.
And for the first time in a long while, Andrew felt warm .