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feral-mouse · 4 days ago

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palette - cass (yandere oc) x reader [5.9k]

there is more than simply being nice to look at that goes into being an artist's muse.

cw: nsfw, dark content, horror content. calling cass a 'yandere' is debatable but it's the closest we're getting! kidnapped and tortured reader, references to past dub-con. stabbing, blades, violence, blood, rootling around in wounds. gore. this is horror first and foremost.

you can read more about cass here.

this was a commissioned work.

It's downright offensive how charming Cassian March looks, even running on less than an hour of sleep with blood crusted under his fingernails and rumpled clothes. He simply seems to have one of those faces; a lucky biological quirk that says that no matter what awful things he does or how much he neglects himself he will continue to look like some painting come to life, a Renaissance face attached to the mind of a madman.

You should find him repulsive. You should recall the way he'd looked with his fingers dripping in your blood and his face a cruel half-snarl half-smirk. You should look back on him with an ornate letter-opener in his hand and want to gag. But even then--

He'd had something about him the first time you'd seen him, but it had been the roguish charm of a man who seemed to halfway belong in a different era. When he had smiled at you and swept a bow during his introduction, his cut-glass accent a purr as he'd told you he was enchanted to make your acquaintance even in the middle of an art gallery milling with tourists, you had found him utterly charming. A little imposing, and certainly you'd been intimidated knowing exactly who he was - but you had still thought of him as a man.

And he'd worked to keep you interested, too! There'd been that little flash of arrogance, that told you that he knew he was handsome and talented - but he'd spoken to you like an equal, his words flashing back and forth with yours like the clang of swords hitting one another. Every time you'd won a roar of laughter (entirely un-self-conscious; Cassian March has always, you think, expected the world to mould around him instead of fitting himself into its grooves). He'd taken you out to restaurants you'd never be able to afford by yourself, laughed and introduced you to his society friends like his equal, taken you to the theatre and the ballet and only gotten a little drunk and whispered things into your ear that had made you blush . . .

And you had thought yourself so lucky. A Cinderella story; a handsome aristocrat sweeping you up, making your dreams come true. And he was handsome - you'd thought the eyepatch an idiosyncracy allowed to him by his station in life until he'd confided in you about his accident, and then you'd been so terribly doting on him about it, never knowing that there'd come a time you'd wish he'd been outright killed in it. Well-dressed, too - elegant and lovely with cheekbones that could cut glass and an abundance of silky auburn hair falling to his back, making you think of all of those dandies and romantics from your historical books you'd always had a fondness for.

When he had asked you to his estate, intimated he wanted to paint you with no other distractions around, that he truly felt like he'd found the perfect muse for his art . . . the way you felt had been indescribable. Fortune had truly - finally - smiled down upon you; lucky, lucky, lucky.

You know now that you are not lucky.

(Looking back, you see the signs of danger that you had not paid enough attention to at the time. The way that when other people looked at you when he took you out, his fingers would dig too hard into the soft flesh of your arms, almost hard enough to bruise, and he'd spoken just a little too loud to anyone who'd complimented you about how he was the one who got to take you home.

The way, when he kissed your neck, he would bite with just a little too much force, suckle on your neck until you'd look in the mirror and wonder if perhaps he was a vampire, the marks he left on you. You'd liked that thought - he was so aristocratic and charming, like a relic from a bygone age . . . A silly romantic notion, but it had pleased you nonetheless.

You should have been warier about going to his estate, too. When he'd casually mentioned the place was falling apart, you'd imagined a few cracks in the plaster and chairs that had obviously been reupholstered, doors that you had to use your shoulder to ram closed . . . Cass always spoke of it with a wistful kind of longing in his voice, and knowing what you did about his time gallivanting around the world as a small boy, you'd wondered if he saw it as a period of stability. You'd embellished rose gardens and a kind old cook and a slightly Mrs Medlock-esque housekeeper, like books and movies you'd seen that featured grand old houses - and the fact that Cass, usually so open about everything, had been vague about Denwood Court had just made you more convinced that it was going to be special.

"It's the only place I can paint," he'd murmured to you, late that same night after you'd apologised for prying. "The only place that's calm and remote and far away enough that it feels like I'm properly alone and able to work. You understand, don't you, darling? I'm so terribly excited to show you it. It's like being the only people left in the world."

Artists are famously of strange temperaments, and you'd accepted this as one of his eccentricities. He liked to work with no distractions. He liked to make sure he wasn't disturbed. What was so strange about that?

Of course, now you know: Denwood Court is a place nobody will hear you scream. Denwood Court is a prison that won't let you escape. Denwood Court is a place where nobody will find your body).

You have to hold your wine-glass with your non-dominant hand.

Your other hand is bandaged up in strips of one of Cass' shirts - and this only because you'd badgered him about it, only because you had glared at him and used what medical knowledge you did have to tell him if he left it out in the open your wound might get infected and go septic and necrotic, and then who was he going to torture in the name of 'art'?

He'd seemed interested in the idea of necrosis, wondering aloud about the colours - but you'd reminded him that it would no doubt come with your death, and hadn't he told you that there was no use for him in a corpse as model? When you'd hit back with this, trying to pretend to be brave, Cass had looked at you keenly with his one good eye (you try to ignore the other, and the way that it seems to squirm as if it's something alive) and then let out one of those low, pleased laughs. He likes it when you fight back a bit, you've learnt. He likes it when you remind him that you're a person and not just a mannequin for him to pose and play with.

"Oh, alright then," he'd said, giving you a patient smile like the kind an indulgent family member gives a precocious child. "Give me your hand here, then."

He'd still poked around in the open wound, spread it open with his thumbnail, pressed his fingers deep enough into it so that you'd felt like he was going to hit bone and you'd had to force yourself not to black out - but in the end, he'd splashed some of the heart-rendingly expensive alcohol onto it to 'sterilise' and then used the strip of the shirt to bind it. You're not sure if you'll ever have full motion of your hand again - but you're also not sure if you're ever going to see any part of the world other than Cass' home again, so you have decided not to think about it all too hard.

It's hard to look at him, as he pours another great swig of blood-red liquid into his own glass. His eye is uncovered, and there is blood all down the front of his half-unbuttoned shirt. Some of it might be paint - there's a half-finished oil painting on one of the easels in here, the scent of it all mingling in your nose until you feel light-headed and dizzy and sick.

It's still better to look at Cass then it is to look at the painting, of course, where you're confronted with half of your own face, your eye wide open and a tear streaming down, your mouth twisted in pain and a great open gash across your cheek, the blood darker than the flush under the skin.

That wound is starting to heal today, though you know that Cass will painstakingly open it up again when he next wants to work on the painting, because there is nothing better than fresh blood and fresh pain. For now, though, the blood has scabbed over and you just have to be careful how wide you open your mouth to drink from the glass in order to avoid reopening it yourself.

(You think if you did accidentally do that it may very well awaken something in Cass, too, and this idea of spending a night talking and drinking will quickly turn into a night of him furiously painting and you trying to avoid giving him the satisfaction of crying out in pain).

And you don't want that.

There's something almost . . . easy about the atmosphere tonight. If you took all of the pain and the painting and the false promises out of the equation, you could almost enjoy yourself. There's wine in your hand and he looks handsome in the evening light, comfortably sprawled across from you on the floor, smiling at you when he sees you looking at him.

Of course, the floorboards beneath him are stained with blood, one or two are missing, the wallpaper is peeling and what little furniture is here in the room he uses for his 'studio' is faded and ancient. The window is cracked and there's always a draught of wind coming through the grubby, unwashed panes--

But it belongs to him. But it's a hot evening and the breeze is welcome. But it all feels dreadfully bohemian and romantic. And Cass is not hurting you, not right now, and when he smiles at you in that lazy, leonine way he has your heart still skips a beat.

"You're looking particularly lovely tonight," he says, his voice halfway to a purr, and you know that you'd probably make all the same decisions you did before if you met him in an art gallery again, even with the knowledge of what he is and what he'll do.

"Perhaps it's the blood?" You ask him with a faint smile on your face. You're wearing some kind of ancient white gown he'd found in one of the dusty wardrobes, delight colouring his features when he'd brought it to you. It's designed to flow, and you'd been grateful it had fitted and was clean (your own clothes did not, Cass had said, match his vision - and besides, four days in, you'd been afraid they'd stand up on their own if you wore them for much longer). There are stains on the diaphanous material now, dark red rust and some brighter, newer ones, on the trailing sleeves and the hem and the neckline. Cass likes that, too.

("A reminder of the pain we go through," he'd murmured, pinching the fabric between his thumb and forefinger. "Of the agony that you endured - brave, sweet thing you are - even before you felt what it was to truly hurt. Yes, I think they add something to it all. And the more you bleed on it, darling, the better I think it will look in the paintings. Don't you?").

He laughs again, throwing his head back, revealing the hollow of his throat as his hair ripples soft and shining down his back.

"I think you'd be lovely even without it," he says, and he crawls towards you. On any other man, it ought to look ridiculous - but Cass somehow makes it look like he's a predator approaching prey, elegant and purposeful. You're a rabbit to a wolf, or a lamb to a lion, a doe to a hunter. You wonder if those creatures ever think about how beautiful their doom looks. "But it does add a certain je ne sais quoi, don't you think? Like an innocent maiden. You've seen Vernet's Angel of Death, yes? How much lovelier she would have been with the proof of her exit from the mortal plane splattered down her nightdress. I think it truly . . . brings you out of your shell."

He's close now. You're sitting against a wall, and he is by your feet, looking up at you with hungry eyes. Even the inhuman one, the one that writhes and bleeds and chatters - even that one looks hungry, and it makes you breathless to remember that he's hungry for you.

You should be horrified, as he moves closer and closer and closer. You should push him away and fight back - but you don't. You let him move until he is atop you, until his mouth is on yours and he kisses you with wine lingering on his tongue. One of his hands curls around the back of your head, his fingers tangling into your hair, pulling you into him as if he wants to devour you. You gasp into his mouth when teeth tug at your bottom lip - and it spurs him on, until he digs hard enough into the soft flesh there to draw blood, and he groans aloud at the salty copper taste as it floods both of your mouths.

You have grown used to the taste of blood. It is not so abhorrent as it once was - this is far from the first time he's gotten carried away kissing you, and you know if it is blood in your mouth, staining your lips red as he kisses, at least it is not blood from somewhere else. At least it is not from the wound that will kill you. Not yet, at any rate.

He pulls back, your blood staining his mouth, and looks at you with a grin.

"See?" He says, and fingers curl around your chin, tilting it towards the low evening light. "Isn't that so much more fascinating? So much more real? Doesn't it all seem so much more alive when we remember how close we are to death?"

"That's easier to say," you whisper to him, slowly, as the haze of the kiss dissipates, "when you're the one doing the hurting and not the one feeling it."

Cass laughs. He always does when you answer back; you don't think you're quite what he expected - certainly, you've seen him frown at his paintings of you an inordinate number of times, seen his brow crease and heard him mumble in frustration under his breath. But when you do find your courage from somewhere deep inside of you, it seems to spark inside of the artist, and he seems to remember why it is he brought you here in the first place.

If you had become a silent witness to his atrocities, if you had simply set your face and let him hurt you and not given him the satisfaction of crying . . . you think he would have gone too far by now. You think he would have worked so hard trying to get you to show your pain that he'd have killed you. Better to play it like this.

You are trying to be smart.

(You were not smart, getting yourself into this position, but there is only so much you can scream at your past self. There is only so much bemoaning the fate that you have carved out for yourself before you have to face it and pretend to have courage).

"Oh, but your job is so much the more satisfying," Cass purrs, his thumb rubbing over the cut on your cheek. "An artist has nothing to paint without his inspiration, does he? And you know, I'm so rarely inspired to paint nowadays . . ."

"You've been painting plenty since you brought me here," you say, deciding to risk it. You are going to die here no matter what - you have made your peace with that. It doesn't matter if you make him angry, if you please him - he is going to kill you, eventually, even if it isn't on purpose. You do not want to anger him - a part of you, not as buried as you would like, still longs for his approval and the way he looks at you like a hungry predator and the touch of his long fingers on your skin. But if you do make him angry, all it will do is hurry along what you have realised is inevitable. "But you haven't seemed that happy with them."

Cass pauses.

He looks at you for a moment, eyes narrowing - before his lip curls into a smirk that makes your heart skip a beat despite itself.

"Perceptive," he purrs. "You're not wrong, darling. No, no. You have inspired some work that I am . . . satisfied with, certainly. But they all just seem to be missing something." The hand against your cheek moves down, and you swallow as his finger draws a line down over your throat, to your collarbones, just stopping at the neckline of the gown.

"And what is that?" You ask him, your voice not quite coming out as strong as you would like. That smirk doesn't leave his face - and his eyes do not leave your own, watching you for every minute flicker of expression, drinking you in the same way he'd drunk in those paintings back at the gallery you had met him in, before you'd realised that this handsome man was going to bring you your own doom.

He doesn't answer the question. Instead, both of his eyes still fastened upon you (you steadfastly try to ignore the noise you can hear whispering at the back of your neck, the soft, wet chattering that you know is coming from whatever inhuman thing inhabits his eye socket), he says to you very softly:

"What is it that you think I'm trying to capture, when I wield a paintbrush in one hand and a knife in the other?"

The softness in his voice surprises you; you feel wrong-footed, confused, aware you might step on a landmine at any moment - but he is in front of you and looking at you and your heart is beating like a caged thing in your chest and your wounds are aching. You are being asked to justify the actions of a madman. But . . .

"Pain," you say to him, and swallow again, shaking your head slightly to clear your thoughts. "Pain . . . and how it changes a person. How it makes them feel. Not just their emotions, but how hurting makes them realise that they're alive - and how quickly that could no longer be the case."

"Do you think that a person can most appreciate their life when they're seconds away from losing it?" Cass asks you, his voice still soft.

You think about Cassian March at nineteen years old in a car with a shattered windscreen. You think about shards of glass scattered and glittering in the flesh of his face, embedded into his eye so the aqueous and vitreous humours and the blood and all of the other fluids leak and dribble over his cheekbones. You think about him, as he had confessed to you one night when wine-drunk and flushed, alone in a hospital bed. You think of him calling his parents, ignored and alone and confused with his eye bandaged, a gaping hole where there once was his sight.

"Yes," you whisper, voice breaking - and Cass kisses you again.

It's hungrier this time, more wanting - and still, despite it all, you kiss him back. Your bandaged hand tangles in his hair and you find yourself gasping into his mouth, the faint tang of blood lingering still on your tongue from earlier. Still - though he is just as hungry, there is something more to it than there was before. In your words, you have exposed something you haven't managed to do before, like a tooth with the nerve endings exposed.

(Don't think too hard about teeth, you tell yourself. Cass has not yet done anything more than probe your teeth with his tongue and use his own to make you bleed and bruise - he does not need any encouragement, and you would rather like to keep your own within your skull).

His hands slide over your body, gripping at you and kneading you and squeezing you with an inhuman fervour and strength. Too strong to be fully mortal, too fast, too in tune with the things that seem to whisper to him from beyond . . . It should make you roll your eyes at the cliche. But you simply kiss him back, think about the house that settles and creaks around you, and feel like you are something important. A part of the story. More than just another humdrum being floating through life.

Pain. Being alive. Art and inspiration and hurting and blood. You're part of Cass' story now. You'll remain, even if it is just in snatches of canvas, a screaming mouth or a crying eye. At least you won't fade. At least you'll be something. You'll leave something behind.

You can almost sympathise with his need to create a masterpiece when you think of all of the people who leave this plane without ever making their mark.

He pulls back and his eyes are wild and he is beautiful at the same time as you understand, instinctively, that he is dangerous. You've seen him look turned on before - you've seen him look excited, you've seen him look flirty and amused and all kinds of other emotions. But you've never quite seen him look like this.

You suppose the only word that you can think of to truly describe it is 'inspired'.

"Yes," he breathes to you, and then he is standing up and grabbing your hands, dragging you onto your feet. You wince at how tight his grip is over your bandages, but you have no choice but to go with him or let him drag your whole weight up - despite the lithe frame, you know that Cass is capable of carrying far more than he ought to be. You stumble on the uneven floorboards, but Cass doesn't care as he pulls you close to him, cradling you like some mockery of a slowdance. He embraces you.

It must look like a scene from a movie to outside eyes - you in white marked with red, Cass with his own bloodstains, the sun setting in the back of a cracked window as he sways with you there on the floor of a house that has all gone to faded and ruined grandeur. You can see it in your mind's eye, and you know that if it were just a movie it would be one you would devour over and over and over, daydreaming about being in the position that you're in.

It turns out that the romance is not so easy to feel over the aches and the pains and the blood and the bruises, but looking at Cass' beatific and inspired face, sculpted like he is the art and not the artist . . .

"You understand," he says to you, hands moving to grip your hips instead. "You understand that I do it like this - I use the blade and the teeth and everything else besides - because there's nothing more beautiful, more alive, than someone who is hurting! You understand that it has to be like this, don't you?" His words are coming thick and fast, his normally cut-glass accent thickened and slurred with the wine you two have been drinking. "You're beautiful! You're perfect! I don't know how I wasn't already seeing it--"

"Cassian--"

"No, no, no. Don't you worry your pretty little head for a moment, my darling. I understand entirely what I need to do now. And you understand too! You understand enough to hold on for me, don't you? Even when I hurt you, I need you to keep yourself living. Keep your heart pumping. Let yourself cry and sob and beg, let your face move in all the ways you've thought were ugly - but keep yourself alive." Tenderly, he looks down at you, and you hate that your heart skips and hops at the expression.

"You understand why I do it like this," he repeats to you, smiling softly, letting go of one of your hands. A dull warning flares at the back of your head, but you ignore it - what can a warning really do? When Cass will do whatever he likes to you, no matter what? "Oh, that understanding . . . that's what I've been missing when I paint. That gleam that says you hurt, but you know why. Oh, my dearest, my darling . . . We are going to make you into a masterpiece."

And you see the flash of the knife and are just able to brace for impact as Cass drives it hard into your abdomen.

Less than ten percent of abdominal stab wounds are fatal, statistically. This is one of those facts that you know from reading too much about strange things for your own interest; in horror and reading and writing and art, it is normal to have to use Google to find out things that make you worry you might be put on a list.

It is not, as it turns out, that comforting a statistic when you are actually the victim of an abdominal stab wound.

The surprise and the sudden rush of pain make you black out for a second, and when you come to you have been dragged over the floor to a spot on the stained boards which is being lit by the setting sun, beams falling onto the blade of the knife and sending refracting silver light all over the opposite wall. Cass is breathing heavily, his elbows pressed to his knees as he leans over you.

The inhuman eye has begun to leak blood, dripping down his cheekbone, as if the things inside of it have begun to get excited.

"Ah, there we are!" He says, delighted, when your eyes blink back open. "Don't give up on me now, darling; we're just getting started. I've got more than enough experience to know where to slice you without you coming to grievous harm, you know - I was quite put out when you did that!"

You blink up at him, cognisant of the fact he just stabbed you, but still somewhat in shock.

"Chin up, now," he says. "I've got to get the knife out. One easy motion, you might bleed a bit--"

A bit is an understatement. Cass grabs the handle of the knife and slides it out of you, and you watch in mute horror as more blood than you've seen from your body bubbles up out of it, thick and viscous as it stains your gown.

The pain, too, feels worse than when he merely stabbed you. You feel something sour in the back of your throat and you try to pray you won't throw up. You know that Cass is probably right, and he does know where to stab - but it somehow still feels like he's dragging your organs out of you with the blade.

(In medical dramas, they always say to leave the object in; stabilisation is easier when it's stopping the blood flow. You can see exactly how those objects stem it now, as more blood bubbles out of you like you're a faulty tap).

"Oh," Cass breathes, staring at the wound and then you with that wild look in his eye still. "That's exquisite, isn't it. The colour against the fabric. Against your skin. The noise you made when I pulled it out. The way your eyes went all wide and pretty--"

"Please," you manage to get out, your voice halting. "Cass, that hurts--"

"It's supposed to," he whispers, in the voice of a man kneeling at an altar, someone witnessing something divine. "It's supposed to hurt, remember? In pain, we find beauty. We find art. If only I could make the hurt last longer--"

The knife is still in his hand. His gaze flickers from the hole in your stomach to the blade, and you think he's about to stab you again, or perhaps use it to make the wound bigger.

"Don't," you whisper. "No more of the blade, Cass." You fumble around in your head for the words. Dizziness is a sign of blood loss, isn't it? You're finding it hard to think, and you wonder if it's because of all of the fluids you're losing. You could die right here. If he stabs you again you're sure that you will, so you try and think desperately of something that might make him stop. If this is how he is when he's inspired, when you've really managed to get to him, you almost miss how he was when he was frustrated you weren't turning into a masterpiece. At least you were alive.

(But he looks handsome with the knife, the part of your inner subconscious you try to silence whispers. Didn't he only stab you because he was fascinated by you? Because he found you irresistible? Because you got down to it, to those secret tender parts he hides behind his persona?).

"I-isn't it so much less organic?" You say. "So sterile, so cold . . . Just a way of getting between the artist and the art? No more of the knife . . ."

You say it so perhaps he will look at you and decide you're worthy to be painted now; that you've met the conditions. That your face - you cannot see it but you imagine it wan and romantic, your brow creased with pain, your mouth red with the blood he pulled forth in the kiss and your eyes steely and determined - is the kind he has always wanted to capture.

When he drops the knife, you think you have succeeded in the plan.

When he drops to his knees and hungrily, desperately reaches towards you and presses his fingers into the wound, you realise you haven't.

Oh, it's worse.

He shoves his fingers into the wound as if he is tearing open an envelope, not caring that you are a living breathing human with flesh and blood and that it sends pain radiating through you - and then he uses his other hand, another finger, and uses them to pry the sides of the wound apart, opening the wound up wider as if he's trying to make the hole bigger--

You groan and Cass groans at you in return. Your noise is pain - Cass' noise is somewhere between desire and satisfaction. The blood coats his fingers, all kinds of shades of red. The layers of fat and skin that he has shown to the air make you feel dizzy; red and pink and yellow and orange, bathed in the evening glow, making it shine in a way that feels almost lewd.

Not quite as lewd as the sight of Cass' long artist's fingers sliding into the wound and out of it, pressing against the fat and the edges of the skin. The wound that was once at least neat from the blade becomes ragged as skin tears from his rough treatment.

"Fuck," Cass breathes, staring down at you. "It's beautiful. You're beautiful."

You can't respond to him.

You feel cold and shivery, your wound open to the air. The area that he's opening up burns; that bile rises in the back of your throat again, hot and sour. Little white dots dance in front of your eyes. You can barely move your tongue to whimper, as you feel tears bead in the corner of your eyes from the pain.

Your chest is moving in panicked, quick breaths. Your body knows this is dangerous, and so does your mind - but Cass is too far gone to think of anything other than his art, of colours and composition and how he can replicate the feel of having his hands buried in your wound on canvas.

You're sickly cold. Cass is moving, fingers dripping blood, and then he's dragging the easel over by one leg, his box of paints. The sound of it against the floor feels so loud - but not quite as loud as your heart, pounding in your ears. Your mouth is open to pant; you feel drool slipping from one of the corners, but you can't bring yourself to care as you swear you feel the stab wound pulsing.

"That's right," Cass whispers to himself, staring at you with an unhinged light in his eyes. "Let it out, darling. Scream. Cry. Forget about being pretty, forget about anything but how it feels when I do this--"

You do scream, as Cass drives one of his paint brushes into the gaping wound.

He doesn't exactly stab you with it; but there's enough pressure that you feel it, the sable hairs as they drag along your insides and he coats the implement in your gore. He lets out a shuddering moan, all eroticism, as your body weakly spasms as if trying to force the invading object out.

If you looked at his crotch, you know that he'd be pressing hard and wanting against his trousers, and you try not to think of the phallic implication of his fingers and his paintbrush and the widening of your wound.

"What a colour!" Cass whispers in awe as he pulls it out, and paints a great swathe of blood against the canvas. Disgust and pain war with one another on your face, and Cass takes another great breath, panting himself, blood painting his cheekbones even as they flush themselves like he's a Botticelli cherub. "Oh, darling. This is it. This is my masterpiece."

He looks down at you and smiles and smiles and smiles, another paintbrush driving into your wound, another great beautiful graceful arc against plain white.

"Not just the subject," he whispers, "but the palette. Do you think from different openings, you'll bleed different shades? Carmine and scarlet and burgundy and coral - oh, I'm going to open you up everywhere, darling. You're going to bleed for me. You're going to cry for me."

His hand is still bloody when he brings it to his mouth and kisses his thumb, his tongue darting out to taste you. His voice is full of worship.

"We're going to be immortal together, you and I."

That's what he calls the piece, in the end. Palette.

Six nights. Not a single red oil paint opened; but eight stab wounds, on various parts of your body, forced and torn open to Cass could get at them. One hand that will never work again, even with Cass' messy attempts to make sure you didn't bleed out from the knife he stuck through your palm, muttering feverishly about stigmata and Saint Francis and Giotto, about how much better it would have been with the blood--

And that's the worst part of it all.

Even in your weakened state, when it hurts to move, when every breath makes your wounds (messily stitched and cleaned by Cassian March himself, with kisses and promises that he'll make sure you live, you have to live, you two are twined by destiny and beauty and immortality now) hurt . . . he shows you the painting.

And he's right.

It's beautiful. It's revolutionary. It robs your breath and makes you wonder if you've ever really seen beauty before that moment. Before this painting, that your pain and your suffering and your blood and the ugliest parts of your insides somehow inspired.

And with that knowledge comes, like a train inexorably steaming along the tracks, this other inescapable fact:

It will not be yours and Cass' last collaboration.

#cass #pip oc #writing #blood #gore #OUGH THIS IS SO SO GOOD #I COULD FEEL IT. IM LIKE YIKES THAT HURTS /pos #❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

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