#heeheehooo I have no shame. I am unstoppable

[dirty-bosmer]

Fandom: Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Relationship: Mathieu Bellamont/Lucien Lachance but in the "haha, I want to kill you so bad that I'll cut you open and crawl inside your skin" sort of way. content warning: dissolution of the self, murder and the grief that accompanies it.

I just really love Mathieu Bellamont, okay? He gives me more excuses to write angst. Here I wanted to write a series of microfics that explore the tragic relationships he has with the people in his life, past and present

Preview:

Because at nine you saw his sickness in the flesh, an evil so mindless, so monstrous that your little voice couldn’t yet find the words to name it anything but death. Because death’s fist clenches much further than its arm can reach, and only in her absence did you learn her passing had killed the both of you, that beyond the artifice, beneath the skin, it was all blood and bone and borrowed time.

Remember the breeze? Remember its salt tang? Remember the snap of the sails in the harbor, the rolling rhythm of Wayrest’s waters, how sharp the first breath hit the back of our throats when we rose from the white-wash, hand in hand?

When we were together— alone together— we were perfect, could have stayed like that forever. Weren’t you happier too when it was just the two of us, you and I away from Father? If only you knew what I knew, that nothing else really mattered. Together, we were whole, Mother. Why did you have to bring us back to that house we knew was never a home?

— from the diary of Mathieu Bellamont

—

Because at nine you saw his sickness in the flesh, an evil so mindless, so monstrous that your little voice couldn’t yet find the words to name it anything but death. Because death’s fist clenches much further than its arm can reach, and only in her absence did you learn her passing had killed the both of you, that beyond the artifice, beneath the skin, it was all blood and bone and borrowed time. Ten thousand suns and ten thousand more to come— they rise, each one, like the weals left by biting gnats. As a boy, all your wounds too were circles, and sometimes you wonder, were there anything left of him, what shape would he have become?

The shadows pulse along the sanctuary wall— yours, a gnarl of limbs bent by the weight of accruing grief that as a boy frightened you so much you fell asleep with your eyes open. Hours you’d spend watching your silhouette warp in the receding light, convinced even your own body could betray you. And why shouldn’t it? Flesh deceived you once before, and your father’s blood beats within you still, a traitor’s poison. Hear it sloshing. Hear it straining, slow and viscous, stirred by some feat of necromantic magic keeping your corpse tethered to Nirn. Yes, though these eyes blink and this mouth moves, you hang beneath the surface of the skin. The hand in the puppet, the echo of an old command, yet there is no more man here than there is in a persistent haunting. Vellum thin, an islet of bruise in a blue spider web of veins. On your tongue, a ferrous taste. Were you a curse or were you never more than an afterthought of Arkay’s to begin with? See, it’s not so much death you’ve cheated as it’s life you’ve managed to escape, but men as small as you can do that when made up of empty space.

Your existence has been no more than an exercise in breathing as little as possible, taking only from Nirn what is needed to carry onward one more day. Consume too much of life, and you risk dissolving the formlessness you’ve cultured. Someone might notice, reach out and touch you, pull you off your liminal stage. Pray tell, what happens then? Do you precipitate? A deposition— can you turn the vapor back to crystal, form the memory of what was into the man who should have been? If someone called your name, could you answer sure and without wincing? Could you level a stare, gaze back into the eyes of the damned and living and see reflected there the shape of you, the quake of you? Could you risk it?

To go on knowing that maybe you weren’t drowned completely, that all this time you could have saved yourself if only you had reached, that when Arkay turned his back and let the dead wash up, blue and bloated, maybe your mother’s life wasn’t the one you’d been brought back to retrieve.

And are you both or are you neither when all that’s left of her is your face? No, no. Tell yourself she is not gone, merely going, and keep your grip tight even if it demands all of your strength, because wherever she is, there you are too. Remember that her heart beat once for the both of you, and though what you share now is not life, it is sacred, a bond more binding than your father’s blood. How could anyone else comprehend it? The others sleeping in the sanctuary, their body heat like a low grade fever, will never know you’re not their brother, already someone else’s son. And you’re a son as long as you remember that you are a part of her, the heart of her, that even before you came into this world, you were wanted, you were loved.

And if the boy you were was still here, would you recognize him? Would he, you, lying awake as you are now, dry eyes turned to the horizon’s beginning light? Imagine him somewhere on the water, trawled up and imploded, body misshapen, his smile split like an open coffin. Imagine him shadowless and shapeless, lying still and blistering with hope as he waits for the next of ten thousand suns for the day he’s made back into one.

Take comfort then in having been born again a ghost, for you do not look to the future. There is none.