#i'll put this up on ao3 when it's not 2:30am

[daisychainsandbowties]

bea - eviscerate + stitch

this dark is everywhere, we said (and called it light)

a percy jackson au

///

Lilith wakes to the latent heat of volcanic glass seeping up through the palms of her hands, lacing along the blade of her cheekbone, drinking down the tears that scatter out of her lashes as she lurches awake, gasping.

She’s lying spreadeagled on hard, garish black rock, glittering with the reflection of enormous stalactites – a ceiling of sharp ends diving down out of the gloom. Her hair, distinguishable only as a more greyish shade of black, is stuck in clumpy patches to the ground and it peels away as Lilith forces her leaden arms to move, pushing away from the ground that always seems like it wants to eat her.

A tremor of white pain travels from her breastbone to the hook of her floating ribs, and she groans as she glances down at blood-sticky rock. It is shiny, glassy like a dead black eye – and Lilith sees her sword lying in the manner of a crooked smile underneath her upraised body. The hilt is shaped like a fishhook, the blade concave near the hilt and pitching out into a broad convex near the tip.

There’s a chain of soft gold running from the hook of the handle to the blade, and it shines strangely in the wet reflective surface of the volcanic stone that runs up to the high walls of hell itself.

Lilith knows, without looking, that there is a very specifically-shaped bruise running from just underneath one of her breasts down the rungs of her ribs, terminating just above her hip. Others too, splashed across her jaw and the socket of her right eye. There is dried blood crusted in her hairline and on her lips, cuts beneath her clothes that have bled into the fabric.

The last thing she remembers is fighting, knee-deep in snow somewhere in the Himalayas. Red spotted in the drifts and an old oil lantern trying vainly to scoop the darkness up off the snow, throwing reflections onto white-capped stone. She was following a fresh trail of blood and gore up a switchback that couldn’t really be described as a path when a great shape came crashing out of the night.

She recalls being swept aside by a massive paw, or maybe a hand, and landing dazed in the snow. Rolling aside just in time to avoid a sharp-seeming downstroke. Might have been claws, or a blade, or a set of enormous teeth. Her lantern rolled away, and Lilith heard the ringing in her ears that announced death. She scrambled to her feet and saw where her light had been tossed away, where it came to rest by a shape lying limp in the snow, surrounded by a halo of blood.

Lilith didn’t need to roll the corpse over – didn’t have time, as snow swirled and a shape stalked her. There, with snow and ice muddling the feeling of stone beneath her feet, she felt powerless. She couldn’t reach out and rend the earth, couldn’t call fire up from the mantle of the planet. Too much interference, too much fear.

There was a crumpled polaroid in the back pocket of her jeans, showing a smiling woman in a puffy green jacket, pretending to blow on her hands for warmth, though she stood next to a bonfire and underneath a clear, starry sky.

There was no need to roll the corpse over because the jacket lay in pieces around the body, rent by claw or blade or teeth, and Lilith felt anger surge up inside her as she tore her sword out of its sheathe and turned in a wary circle, trying to pierce the blizzard with the tip.

But then she heard a flurry of movement behind her and something rammed into her back, tossing her forward and face-first into snow. A phantom voice in her head whispered through the wind as Lilith reached vainly, dizzily, for invisibility, for her god-given power over not being. Coming up, as usual, against the wall of her own scattered focus.

A voice in her head saying, shut the fuck up and fucking Travel, or so help me I’ll come back to life and murder you.

And so she Traveled. Reaching out to gather up the shadows into a soft blanket, into a blade she pressed willingly through her own body, carrying it away from the blood in the snow and the monster in the dark. And there was nothing and no one and nowhere to think of but home, wretched though it is.

Hades.

Lilith stands, dragging the sword with her so that it dangles with the tip almost touching the ground, resting the blade flush against the curve of her boot. It has a soft black glow, down here in such proximity to the waters where Lilith stood, stripped to the waist and running with cold sweat. Where she dipped the fresh-forged blade into the polluted waters of the Styx.

She’s wearing her black aviator jacket, sunglasses sticking out of the pocket, over a somewhat threadbare t-shirt with a weird, shadowy creature on the front. She keeps meaning to Google what it is, but a giant snake ate her phone last month.

And, anyway, there’s no one left to call.

As ever, a pall of ghoulish green light sits over the gateway to the underworld, seeping along the riverbank in both directions. It’s a little like dry ice, but this isn’t a stage or a theatre. It’s just where she lives.

Lilith frowns down at herself, at the spots where her jacket has frayed, where the black leather has cracked or been scraped away by claws, the chill sitting barely above her bones from weeks of sleeping rough up on the surface. The golden chain on her sword settles against her knuckles – a faint, weird warmth – and Lilith lets a small sigh escape from inside her mouth as the greenish mist rolls past her.

There’s something about the mist that feels animate, today. It almost seems to cup her cheek, to flow over her cheekbone like a cold thumb, taking a little heat out of the bruises. Though, there’s a pressure to it – almost a reprimand.

Lilith stares towards the gates and the looming canine shape that sits squarely inside, worrying the inside of her lip. Is it her imagination, the slightly-chiding care that runs through the green light, the cool river mist?

She doesn’t speak to her father – not more than a handful of times in her life. He didn’t save her mother from the bombs or her sister from starvation, and he tucked her away in a dreamless sleep until he had a use for her. So what does she owe him?

Nothing.

Certainly not conversation, or whatever paltry imitation of love he can scrimmage out of his rotten heart. Fuck you, she thinks. There’s no benefit in saying it aloud, but Lilith lifts her middle finger, pointing it towards the mammoth walls, toward Cerberus and the stupid, banal bureaucracy of death.

The ghost in her head chuckles, low, and Lilith feels the golden chain brush her fingers again though there is no wind here to move it.

A wave of dizziness wash over her – a wild urge to lift the hilt of the sword up to her mouth and kiss the chain, but all she does is stand there in the shadow of her father’s kingdom, aching down to the marrow of her bones.

Then, from behind, from down in the direction of the ferry, she hears the scrape of wood over stone. Here, on the parallel shore of the Styx where nothing moves or walks or breathes but Lilith.

She whirls, sweeping her sword around so that she stands – unsteadily – with her body held sidelong in a narrow target, blade parallel with her raised arm, tip pointed towards whatever foul thing has crawled up out of the river.

Then she freezes, blinks, feels all the moisture in her mouth turn coppery and sour, because it’s not a monster.

It’s a girl.

Shorter than Lilith, with a pair of dark eyes pooled above a grim little mouth. Lilith realises – with a sense of disquiet – that she is beautiful. There’s a dust of freckles sitting like an afterthought on her nose, her cheeks, drawing out the dark shadows beneath her eyes. Her mouth is pulled tight, grimacing, but it hardly upsets the softness of her jaw.

She’s wearing a dark blue shirt over what looks like a thermal base layer. It’s cold down here, though it has never truly bothered Lilith. She’s built for it, or just used to it. Despite the extra protection, there is still a faint tremor sweeping through the girl as she stands, black rock glittering underneath her.

It’s easy to see why.

She is drenched in blood, leaning heavily on a spear made of bronze, decorated with tiny winged shapes. Lilith can’t make out what flying creature it is, but she makes a guess. There is, indeed, an owlishness to the girl as she stands, blinking through the gloom at Lilith, making no move to defend herself as blood spills out from where her palm is pressed into her stomach. Lilith can see the pink glisten of unearthed viscera beneath it, can see that her fingers are pressed inside to the knuckles.

A half-blood, then.

Lilith’s fingers tighten around the hilt of her sword. It’s Stygian iron – a substance that can only be forged in the waters of the Styx, capable of absorbing the essence of monsters, ripping them even out of Tartarus. Monsters and mortals and gods fear it, but the girl only blinks down the curve of the sword as Lilith holds it aloft.

Her voice, when it drifts out of her mouth, rolling into the mist, is clipped and precise and soft. All by itself it makes a crack in Lilith’s resolve.

‘You’re the daughter of Hades?’

It is, Lilith thinks, mostly a statement. In her bruises and her battered black clothes, with the life-eating pall of a Stygian sword in her hand, Lilith looks like the bastard child of death.

The stranger is a hazy shadow, cut to the quick by the perpetual drain of this place; the sewer of the Styx washing by with a sound like a hundred thousand muttering voices.

Blood patters softly onto the stone at her feet, but it scarcely has a chance to pool before the stone swallows it. The girl, hair half-unbound around her shoulders, strands falling down around her face to complicate it with shadows, stares at her own boots for an instant, wobbling. Lilith understands what she is feeling; it took weeks for the rock of this place to feel solid, to stop warbling underneath her with the threat of turning to liquid, to blood, to ink.

Lilith has dreamed of the bottom of hell, and this is not it. This is only the threshold.

‘Who’s asking?’ she growls, taking a careful half-step forward. It’s more of a shuffle, really – a habit born from fencing lessons held deep inside the walls of the Underworld, in a garden full of soft fruits and the promise of spring. The place she learned to fight.

The girl straightens, stiffening under Lilith’s scrutiny. There’s a sort of raw-boned intensity to her, like she’s holding herself very precisely in check. Her fingers, too, have tightened around the haft of her spear.

She’s shaking, blood now flowing down to drip from the tip of her elbow where it’s clamped tight against her body. Lilith wonders what it took for Charon to ferry a dying girl across the river.

The tip of her sword is only a foot from the girl’s throat as it bobs, as she raises her chin to expose the bumpy layers of cartilage sitting in a line; the very slight bulge above her windpipe.

There’s no point in asking who sent her. If she’s a half-blood, there’s only one place she could have crawled from.

Softly, again, the girl speaks. Backlit as she is by the green glow on the shore, she carries the countenance of a ghost. Lilith might mistake her for one, if she didn’t know better.

‘My name is Beatrice,’ she says, in a voice like cold water and warm milk, ‘I am a daughter of Athena.’

There’s blood on her lips, Lilith realises, as they pull into a grimace. They shiver as Beatrice pulls her fingers out of the slit in her stomach, holding them out in wry invitation.

It’s utterly bizarre, but Lilith finds herself lowering her sword, leaving it to sit against the leg of her jeans. Beatrice has proffered her right hand, so Lilith is forced to juggle the sword into her left so that she can reach out, tentative, to wrap her fingers into the sticky, blood-stained cup of Beatrice’s hand.

‘Lilith,’ she says. Somehow, it feels like an admission, like giving something away.

The daughter of Athena smiles. Pink-tinted saliva dribbles down her chin. It’s ghastly, but Lilith finds that she is somewhere on the opposite end of disgusted, wherever that might be.

There are, after all, no destinations along the river Styx but one. Death.

Beatrice squeezes her hand. She takes a ragged breath, her dark eyes heavy-lidded and hazy, boring into Lilith’s. ‘Pleasure,’ she says, a little giddily. ‘I thought I would have to go deeper into hell to find you.’

‘Well, here I am.’

A tightening around her hand, not quite a squeeze. ‘Here you are,’ Beatrice says. She lists forward, catches herself, ‘I’m here-‘

She coughs, and the redness of it floats weirdly in the mist. Beatrice stares, shakes her head like she’s trying to banish a ghost.

Her voice is very faint. ‘We need your help… daughter of Hades.’

Then the daughter of Athena, her skin like dark gold even in the bad light of the Underworld, falls forward. It happens slowly, at first, like she’s just taking a step, but then Lilith sees her knees buckle, watches the spear slip through her fingers.

And without thinking she steps forward, capturing Beatrice’s warm body in her arms.

...

Ten minutes later Lilith crouches next to a limp figure she has propped up against the pitted, high stone wall, feeling like a thief as she unbuttons Beatrice’s blue shirt and peels her black base-layer away from the slice in her lower abdomen.

Her sword is on the ground next to her, at a right angle to her body, the hilt in easy reach. Beatrice’s spear is propped up against the wall. It is, indeed, covered in tiny filigreed owls.

Beatrice does not stir as Lilith raises her hand, ignoring the unhappy shiver of the mist against her back as she draws on the power in her blood, summoning up a sliver of bone from a tiny vial of bone dust she keeps tucked inside her boot. It forms in the air, turning from powder to liquid to solid bone in the span of a moment, before settling down into Lilith’s red-painted palm.

It’s not ideal, but she can hardly wash her hands in the river. It’s full of plastic and rot and blood. Instead, she makes do with the little wadge of bandage and thread she keeps in the pocket of her jacket.

Beatrice continues to breathe as Lilith carefully threads her bone needle. There’s a voice in the back of her head spouting stupid facts about the history of needles and sutures, but Lilith hisses at it to shut up before dipping the sharp end of the bone through Beatrice’s flesh. The thread turns red as it passes in and out, but it’s proper surgical suture, so it also tugs the flesh back towards itself. It makes whole.

Distracted by her work, it takes Lilith too long to notice the change in Beatrice’s breathing. She finishes her row of stitches – they’re thick and lumpy and as elegant as she can make them, but there is no ringing in Lilith’s ears to ordain death, so it must be enough.

At a loss for any other implement, Lilith picks up her sword and carefully cuts the thread, leaving a little curl of it to sit against the taut muscle of Beatrice’s stomach. She has, of course, attempted not to notice the ripple of honed, hard muscle that runs the whole length of what necessity has forced Lilith to unearth; the evidence of a life spent fighting.

She has attempted to ignore it.

When Lilith looks up, sword resting on her knees where she’s crouched, balancing effortlessly on her heels, she finds that Beatrice’s eyes are open. Hazy with pain, but alert underneath it all.

A tentative smile flutters across her lips, ‘You saved my life.’

She dumps the sentence at Lilith’s feet like it means something.

Lilith shrugs, ‘I’m a freak, not a monster.’

The freckled skin on Beatrice’s cheeks wrinkles in tandem with her frown, ‘Wh-‘

‘You said you needed my help?’ Lilith interrupts before the question can come out and make everything awkward.

Beatrice’s stomach is still laid bare, covered in fingerprint marks where Lilith has touched her – in every single place Lilith has touched her.

Mercifully, the daughter of Athena lets her question fall away. Her bronze spear shines off of some strange reflection in the volcanic rock.

‘Yes,’ Beatrice says. There’s some depth to the word that Lilith doesn’t look down into, in the same way she doesn’t peer into the waters of the Styx as the ferry glides over it. Some mysteries are not fit for consumption.

‘Alright.’ Lilith nods, ignoring the way that the gold chain on her sword tightens against her hand, like a warm tongue, ‘Tell me what you need.’

#warrior nun #wn pjo au #sister beatrice #sister lilith #warrior nun fanfic #i'm reading these books again & now it's everyone's problem #gonna call this part 1 #it'll eventually be avatrice & camilith i think but in the meantime have the usual homoerotic bs between bea and lil #ty for the prompt! #casper writes #i'll put this up on ao3 when it's not 2:30am