#this is silly and stupid but i just.. RRRR

[idlecreature]

a mountain is a lovely, cold thing to surround one

Barnabas Bennett and Mordechai Lukas have an... unorthodox relationship. 

Barnabas has debts, and Mordechai makes sure he pays them. 

Vampire!Mordechai for Jonah Magnus Week! Part 1/Part 2/Part 3 

Rating: Mature 

Relationships: Mordechai Lukas/Barnabas Bennett, Jonah Magnus/Barnabas Bennett 

Content warnings: Dubcon, Unhealthy relationships, heavy on the internalized homophobia, the Lonely, manipulation (hence the dubcon warning), Barnabas does NOT die in this fic, happy ending for Barnabas because he deserves it rrrr  

Fragments from a letter written circa Christmas 1814 

—and I am looking forward to fainting at the sight of his sweet little face, Jonah! The splendid mane around his neck! Your little tiger, king of his jungle, king Ceasar, his croaky battle-roar as he runs down the hallway for his cream—

*

Barnabas has a sixth sense for earthquakes. In the hours leading up to one, he feels odd jolts in his bones, like someone is reaching through his skin and rattling him. He feels them where he broke his zygomatic process when his mother dropped him as a toddler, just to the side of his left eye. If he had a soul, he thinks that’s where it would live: in the part of him that was first broken. 

When he and Jonah are thirteen and eleven respectively, he feels his skull itching and watches the trembling of their school’s pet rabbit and the anxious pattern of birds wheeling, and on their tea break, he leads Jonah outside and takes the other boy’s hand and presses it to a patch of bare dirt beside the rugby field. 

“Do you feel that?” Barnabas asks. 

Jonah’s eyes narrow in concentration. His hand scrapes nonsense patterns in the dirt. “Describe what I’m supposed to be feeling?” 

Barnabas shakes his head. How does a thirteen-year-old describe a sense of inescapable doom? It feels like standing outside his mother’s room unbreathing and counting down from twenty before knocking. It feels like being sucked under a wave and not fighting as hard as he knows he should to resurface. It feels like waking up on a grey morning crying. 

The quake, when it hits that evening, lasts for six minutes. An entire epoch for a child. And Barnabas understands it’s no use knowing about an oncoming earthquake if you are powerless to stop it coming on. 

At least he has Jonah, whose dirty hand wraps tightly around his own. 

Despite what Jonah believes, there are some things that just can’t be explained in words. 

*

His skull’s been prickling in recent months. 

It’s gonna be a bad one. 

* 

—It’s freezing cold, and, oh, you know I feel the cold most cruelly. I cannot make myself warm with double-socking, or blankets over my knees, or hot bread and soup... nothing warms me, only the morning sun as she shakes her fiery head. I cannot wait for summer-time—

*

Isabel Blackwood is a saint. 

“Another slice of Three-kings-cake, B....Barny?” Isabel asks, her knife poised in the air. There are two slices left, and James has already found the bean. Her four children stand at her elbows, eyeing the cake with hungry, dark eyes, but they, too, cede to Barnabas. Even the little king bows. 

“Mr. Bennett, if you please,” Barnabas replies, aiming for a terse-but-gentle tone. “And I couldn’t eat another bite!” He pats his stomach in emphasis. 

“Come on, Mr. Bennett, it’s Christmas!” 

“Leave off, Mr. Blackwood,” Isabel says to her husband. She smiles at Barnabas as she cuts the two slices into four and divides them amongst her children. 

“Don’t wolf it down or you’ll make yourselves sick,” Isabel warns the two girls, Frances and Annie. 

The Blackwoods are decent folk, letting him come over for cake on Christmas. They were the first to sign up for Barnabas’ family charity earlier in the year; he has since taken on half a dozen more, but his closest working relationship is still the Blackwoods. The charity pulled the eldest, James, out of the workhouse and into an apprenticeship, made co-payments on lodgings that are just a step above their old squalid tenement, provided them with new ill-fitting clothes. It seems pitifully little to Barnabas, but the Blackwoods seem to worship the ground he walks on. 

You can’t be too friendly with people like that. It’s unfair to you both. It’s awkward enough sitting in their smoky central room, the air smelling like damp and soap and sweat and charcoal, in a tailored suit that may as well have been spun from gold, hands soft from white-collar work, clear-eyed and ruddy-cheeked. Look, his appearance mocks, how the world could be if it were not so cruel. 

Before Barnabas leaves the Blackwoods, the littlest one, Henry, gives him a tight hug. Henry tries to wrap his entire body around Barnabas’ middle, constricting him like a snake, and when he doesn’t seem to want to let go Isabel has to pry him off. 

“Don’t be so clingy,” she chides her son. She looks at Barnabas nervously. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Bennett. He’s somehow got it in his silly noggin that you’re his Uncle.” 

Barnabas looks at her in mute horror. “I - I - I should go,” he says, and makes a hasty exit. 

*

Barnabas runs a finger down the perfectly neat columns of his ledger again, double-checking every minutia of his expenses. He’s made a mistake, he must have missed something. He’s fifty pounds short of where he should be. 

His hands curl into fists. The absence of fifty pounds shouldn’t be a big issue, not for him and his big house and servants and nice things. But the charity is obviously chewing through more of this month’s allowance than he’s anticipated, and he needs to make some adjustments if he wants to be able to keep all the nice things and pay the servants and keep the debt collector from his door. 

This is why he shouldn’t let people become attached to him. Because he ends up disappointing or hurting them. People could starve and it would be his fault. 

A thick splat of water lands on his ledger, making the perfect lines run, and that’s just great, isn’t it? What are tears ever good for, when are they ever useful? He is just a very small cog in a very big machine, and now he’s getting ground up in it like the rest of them. 

But what else can he do? He must participate in the world if he wants it to change for the better, even if it’s a marginal improvement. He could live in the margins. 

He’ll find the money somewhere. 

*

—did you get my copy of Queen Mab? The Vice Society has declared it OBSCENE MATERIAL, and I mustn't be seen with a copy of it in my house, but you do not rely so much upon a good reputation. I hope you keep it safe. I hope you read it and I hope you side with P.B.S. and I. A good world starts with a good person and a few choices that are made with the heart—

*

Barnabas’s game of solitaire lies forgotten as he stares at Jonah.

They are more different now than ever. Barnabas keeps the company of bankers and lawyers and politicians, and Jonah runs with crackpots and devils and the insane. Jonah has fourteen powers; Barnabas has a list of names in his address book. People he barely knows, who remain in his orbit because of his good breeding, his impeccable reputation, and they still only half-listen to his pleading and his petitioning and his politicking. The people with the power to actually change the world; people he wants at arm’s length.  

But there’s just something about Jonah that makes Barnabas want to touch. He flares to gold with an audience; but, even now, curled up on his couch idly scratching between Julius Ceasar’s whiskers, he is a dim and majestic copper. There’s something undeniably old testament about Jonah; the fire and fury of creation, the self-annihilating stare of Lot’s wife. 

Jonah’s close to buried under the Millbank proofs spread over his lap, sucking gently on the tip of his pen, occasionally darting down to make some arcane adjustment on the design—just a penstroke or puzzling scribble. Mostly he just stares at the paper, eyes wide enough to look like holes in his face. When he gets like this, Barnabas can balance teacups on Jonah’s head without him noticing. The record is three. 

“Still keeping the elevator?” Barnabas asks. It’s just one of the many strange embellishments that Jonah’s insisted upon, putting it far outside the budget of any public works project. The price of Jonah’s fancies must run into the tens of thousands of pounds. 

“In my dreams, there’s a glass elevator to the top of my tower, from which I look down upon the imprisoned and the powerless,” Jonah says. 

“Taking cues from your dreams?” Barnabas replies. “You know only the desperately mad do that?” 

“Or desperately inspired—savants and prophets and visionaries.” 

“And prison wardens, apparently,” Barnabas mutters. He bites his teeth together, unwilling to work through this old argument. “Who’s paying for your dream towers, again? Think they might lend me fifty pounds for a project that actually is for the public good?” 

Jonah finally unpeels his eyes from his proofs, and Barnabas’s throat runs dry. Jonah stares until he’s got Barnabas squirming in his seat, and then he says, brightly, “Oh, I’m sure he would. I’m sure I could tell you. But I don’t think I will.” 

“Jonah,” Barnabas says irritably. “That’s very unfair.” 

“Oh, pish posh, life’s unfair, Barny, and I can’t believe that you in your infinite wisdom and your even more infinite disposition to share it can pretend that it isn’t. That the evil in man has made life unfair, that it’s just not the natural order to put some creatures above others.” 

Barnabas counters him an instant later. “Obviously, you stupid little man, not everyone was created equal, but it’s the good in man to want to put things to rights, to create a system where unequal creatures can be equal. Are you trying to make me angry with you by playing the devil’s advocate?” 

“Just testing you,” Jonah says in his alloyed voice, silver-and-honey-gold. 

“Well? Who’s this rich man then?” 

Jonah sticks his tongue out at him. 

“Alright, it’s getting late,” Barnabas says. He tidies his long-forgotten card game and makes ready to leave. 

“Wait,” Jonah says. 

“It really is getting on, Jonah, I promise you can tease me about secret benefactors some other day.” Barnabas stands up and stretches on his stiff legs. 

“No.” Jonah shuts his eyes briefly. “It’s very late. You should stay.” 

Barnabas shakes his head and makes his way out of the fire-warm lounge and into the cold front room. Jonah springs up, sending the proofs flying and Julius Ceasar yowling in annoyance and surprise, and Jonah follows close on his heels. 

“It’s raining,” Jonah says more softly. 

“It is Edinburgh,” Barnabas replies, but cold apprehension curdles in his belly. “I - I need to leave. I - I already visit you too often, Jonah, and you know what people say about you, and they might think that I’m.... I’m some kind of...” 

Jonah steps closer. “Aren’t you, though? ‘Some kind of’?” He reaches for Barnabas’s hand where it is clumsily buttoning his coat. “I know you, Barnabas. Your morality has only ever been a thin cover for your shame.” 

The blood drains from Barnabas’ face. “That’s very cruel,” he whispers. 

“It’s true,” Jonah says. He cants his head. “Haven’t you thought about why your morals don’t ever make you happy? It’s because you wield them like a sword, to keep yourself away from the world. A world that won’t ever accept you for who you are. A world that wants you to keep waving that heavy, sharp thing until you give up and throw yourself upon it. That’s your pain, Barnabas, that’s your fear. Whenever I look at you I can see it as easily as I see your face.” 

Jonah steps closer again. His chin touches Barnabas’s chest, and Barnabas can see the pulse fluttering in his friend’s throat. “It doesn’t have to be that way,” Jonah says. 

“It does,” Barnabas says, stepping out of his reach. “Because - because I’m still afraid, and I still love the world, even - even if to live in it I must throw myself upon my sword and die and haunt my own life, all at the same time.”

Jonah remains silent. If he is stung by the rejection, his expression doesn’t show it. He’s got that crinkle between his brow he gets when he has to solve two maths problems simultaneously.   

“Mordechai Lukas,” Jonah says, eventually. “That’s my moneyed friend. Tread carefully with him.” 

Jonah wishes him no goodbye when he shuts the door. That’s fine with Barnabas. He’s not the only one nursing fresh wounds. 

* 

—I confess since I’ve been away this time my need or my wish for people has absolutely fled. I have learned to love solitude, and I forget what it means to be lonely.— 

* 

Mordechai looms as large as a mountain and is beautiful in the way a portrait is beautiful—two steps removed from humanity. 

He tilts Barnabas’s head to the side, impervious to the muscles in Barnabas’s neck straining against him. 

“Hm,” Mordechai says. 

“I take it you’re not convinced by the moral position, then,” Barnabas spits out. His cheeks are burning, but Mordechai’s other hand is wrapped around Barnabas’s hip, stopping him from stepping away. 

Mordechai laughs; a strange thing, guttering as it starts, in contrast with his unmoving, lifeless, beautiful face. His thumb strokes Barnabas’s cheek despite Barnabas trying to shake it off. “No. But there are certainly other positions to consider.” 

“We’re in public,” Barnabas hisses. He looks pointedly at two women walking down the other side of the street. 

“Are we?” Mordechai murmurs. He’s still circling his thumb on Barnabas’s cheek, but his fingers press down on Barnabas’s carotid artery, taking its measure, making Barnabas’s vision swim with silver fish. 

“What - what vile magic -” 

“Just a glamour.” 

Barnabas processes this new information rapidly. “They can’t see us?” 

“Would you like them to?” 

Barnabas tries to shake his head, but it is locked in place, pulled as taut as a bowstring. The pressure is starting to hurt, and he rests against Mordechai’s hand for a moment to ease it. 

“Good,” Mordechai says, and releases him. Barnabas takes several staggering steps backward, massaging his sore neck. “Spirited, aren’t you?” 

“I can - I can work up a repayment plan, we can sign it at the -” 

“No,” Mordechai replies, his voice heavy with finality. “I decide how I am repaid.” 

Desperation is a harsh master, and Barnabas nods. He’d prefer to keep it off the books, anyway. An agreement between Gentlemen. 

“You will find my terms very agreeable,” Mordechai says. 

Barnabas swallows and feels the heat of his blush creep under his hair. There’s something in the way Mordechai looks at him that promises danger, but Barnabas only feels the anticipation of a fight, so strong he can barely keep it down. He takes his time to make sure he doesn’t sound too eager when he replies. 

* 

In the dark of his bedroom when Barnabas finally wraps a hand around himself, he isn’t thinking about Jonah, his many dog-eared fantasies, tired and sad Frankensteinian conjurations of the few ginger kisses they’ve shared, memories of Jonah flushed, excited, exerted stitched together and his own imagination filling in the rest—they’ve been friends for so long it’s completely understandable if Barnabas’ thoughts occasionally (privately, every night) run to intimacy. He’s trying very hard not to think about Jonah. 

He’s thinking about that strange, death-pale, flat-edged face, the terrible pressure on Barnabas’s jaw, the feeling of compression on his artery, the voice both mocking and stern in turns. Its appearance in Barnabas’s thoughts elicits a new and fierce shame. 

Barnabas rubs his chin, trying to chase the feeling of Mordechai’s hand. 

It’s almost comical, how quickly Barnabas’s shame runs to pleasure. 

* 

His fifty pounds arrives with an invitation. 

* 

The first time Barnabas visits Moorland house, he expects Mordechai to be waiting for him. But Mordechai is not there, and Barnabas is expected to wait. 

Moorland is certainly a large and imposing estate, perhaps once opulent, but it has been left to ruin. The building’s beams sag with damp; its tapestries are delicately laced with powder-white fungus; there is an atrocious stuffed albatross over the mantlepiece with half of its feathers snowed around the room. The grounds are pale and bare; an empty wind roils through. 

Barnabas is fairly certain that Moorland has three servants, but they whip around or disappear through doors when he tries to approach them. Barnabas’s own house is much smaller, but he has just as many in his staff; he suspects that Mordechai is not a rich man at all, just someone with a once-impressive but dead family name and an estate too large to be managed on a pittance. He wonders why Mordechai pretends otherwise. 

These thoughts slip through his mind like freshwater fish down a stream, but Barnabas wanders through the house contentedly enough. After a week he barely even notices the servants’ presence, save for his changing sheets and pressed clothes and the serviceable meals prepared set and left for him in at the kitchen table, in front of the unlit hearth. He eats with blackened silverware and tastes the neglect. 

After two weeks, Barnabas sails through the house in fraying silk undergarments and dusty, pink-tinged mink he’s pulled out of a room he can’t remember, his days blurring together in their monotony. He stops to wipe a sleeve at one of the many ancient, spotted mirrors and squints through the smear of dust at his reflection, trying to reconcile the person standing in front of him with the person he thought he was. Wasn’t he supposed to have a purpose here? Wasn’t he needed in London? There is poverty, suffering; but it is far, far away, and he is in a place it would never touch him. 

There are as many mirrors as there are portraits of Mordechai’s family, all exactly alike, his haunting beauty and domineering presence. Barnabas drags a finger down the paint of one of them, leaving behind a thin white line. A tally mark to as many days he thinks he’s spent in this place. 

He’s sitting at the kitchen table, clipping pearlescent roses from the garden for a floral arrangement when he thinks about all those mirrors, and how a ghost could wander this house trapped forever. If he covers up the mirrors, then he could leave. 

*

Mordechai returns when Barnabas no longer keeps track of days and nights; when the mirrors don’t make him think of anything in particular, although he wonders why half of them are shrouded or turned to the wall. 

Barnabas drifts down to the coatroom and threads his arms through Mordechai’s. 

“Welcome home,” he says dreamily. 

“Hello,” Mordechai says. Barnabas makes a small, disappointed sound when Mordechai disengages himself to unwind his scarf. He scratches his beard. “You’re in a biddable mood.” 

“‘Course I am. I’m lovely,” Barnabas replies. He presses himself to Mordechai, enjoying the whole, solid block of him. Mordechai’s hands are worryingly chilly, and Barnabas gathers them and blows on them gently. Once he finishes the task he settles against Mordechai again, pleased with himself. 

Mordechai forgoes a response but for tipping Barnabas’s head back and sucking an open-mouthed kiss against his neck, working the skin with his tongue and the slick coldness of his teeth, and, oh, this is the touch that Barnabas has craved these past days. He’s felt so forlorn without it, only he never realized. 

He’s gasping and moaning by the time Mordechai splits his skin open and drinks his blood. It’s only then, with his blood being pulled out of him in long, deep strokes, that Barnabas remembers with ice-cold clarity why he’s here; to repay a debt; and that he should be feeling rather a lot of either shame, or anger, pain, or worry, but instead he’s trying to rut his puffed-up prick against the vampire’s body. 

Mordechai licks the wound closed and kisses Barnabas, sharing with him the taste of his own blood. 

“Happy new year,” Mordechai says. 

#the magnus archives #jonah magnus week #mordechai lukas #barnabas bennett #jonah magnus #second part up tomorrow it's just another 3k and my wrists are sore