antivanleather | Fifth Drop - Again, until you decide to drop. Now I'm so high, so high, so high [Action]

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Fifth Drop - Again, until you decide to drop. Now I'm so high, so high, so high [Action]

plans.

His eyes snap open as the thought finishes and for a long moment he can't breathe or think past the remembered pain of a gaping wound and the cold, blissful slide of a knife through his heart. No Isaac, so kind, so cruel to cradle his head. No grit of dirt or stone under his cheek and digging into his back. No clash of battle or distant, strained cry that was so very familiar- oh. Katniss. She'd seen. He's still wrapping his mind around being alive, around breathing when his hands fly to his chest- whole and slick with sweat rather than blood. Alive. He is alive. It is no trick, it is no twist of necromantic intent. He feels no lesser than he had before. Well. Mildly ill and lethargic, yes. But he lives.

And remembers nothing at all of being dead aside from it being a decidedly uncomfortable process to achieve. If he spends too much time thinking on it, he'll drive himself mad. All he can do is take that he is alive with good grace and get to his feet. Laying here is becoming uncomfortable- but for a fair while he can't bring himself to move, relishing the simple act of laying out in the sun and being able to breathe without smelling his own death

When he does rouse himself from where he's settled in the woods he will, without any real sense of urgency- which is fairly odd for him, go first and foremost to Isaac's home. There was something he gave the Forgemaster to hold onto that he needs back. Afterward he finds himself wandering to the clothing shop to find a shirt. Perhaps shoes. Something beyond the plain white trousers the Malnosso gave him upon his revival. From there, it's home. Home to check in on his boys and be yelled at quite a bit.

At his house he'll pick the lock to the front door since he does not have the key upon his person or feel particularly inclined to calling attention to himself, slip inside, and make his way to the kitchen to brew himself a mug of coffee. If a hearty measure of brandy makes it way into the mug as well- can anyone blame him? He's settled there for the first hour he is back home, sitting quietly in the kitchen and sipping away.

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If nothing else, there was tea. It had meant that the house had been rather heavily caffienated as of late, but tea was something they were all used to. It was something that made them actually get up and move, which had become a rare thing in the hours that they were home, huddled up in two and threes and silent save for the ever-present background noise of Jack's music. They'd all fallen into a patchwork provisional routine, tumbled-up bits of what was good for them and what they needed, the former as much as they could handle and the latter to fill in the inevitable chinks. Tea, at least, was blessedly a little of each category.

That, and that alone, had Jack wandering into the kitchen with an empty mug in each hand, perplexed by the time he reached the doorway by the smell of coffee. It wasn't like Max to make coffee when there was already a kettle on, so why-

-and that was where his thoughts stopped - his everything stopped, to be precise. Because while he'd said loudly and repeatedly that Zev would be back, of course he would be back, this was Luceti after all, he hadn't quite figured out the trick of actually believing it. In his mental best case scenarios, the dead stayed dead. In the worst case you were going after your former friends with bludgeoning weapons. And he couldn't quite work his brain around it when faced with the precise reality of what he'd been saying, any more easily than he'd been able to in the past week and change, that Zevran would ever be sitting at their table again, quietly drinking a coffee while the sun streamed in through the window.

To his credit, at least, he neither dropped the mugs nor fainted. He only stared, and went paper-white, and listed until his shoulder hit the door-jamb with a very solid thump.

There's an odd buzzing in the back of his head, still. The newness of hearing everything. He'd checked himself over when he'd grabbed the ratty, oversized turtleneck, the sleeves long enough to cover his hands and the cuffs folded back to prevent that from happening, the hem hanging to his thigh. The tattoo Isaac had given him? Gone. The knicks and small scars earned while cooking? Gone. He had a harder edge to him, leaner, paler, hair shorter. As he was when he first arrived. Fresh from the Deep Roads, all lean flesh and hollow eyes.

Perhaps that was why he chose so bulky clothing, the sweater and worn jeans that hung low on his hips as he leaned against the counter pouring himself another mug of coffee and brandy. Thud had his head snap up- tense and startled like a deer. He should have noticed.

But everything was still a little muzzy.

Jack. Just Jack. He offered the man a crook of a smile.

"Argento."

Did Zevran look different? Jack couldn't say. His last memory of the man's face was the distinctive off-coloured, sunken pale of someone who's dead and mostly exsanguinated, too still and faintly glossy with the water they'd used to get the worst of the blood off. Plus it was hard to focus on him, mind flitting hummingbird-erratic to a thousand things, skittery and terrified of the incomprehensible thing that was Zevran breathing and moving, Zevran without a speck of grime on him, Zevran in the damned kitchen drinking coffee in a terrifyingly ugly sweater like a one night stand cocooned in borrowed clothing, Zevran-

Zevran smiling at him.

"Oh. God."

The Jack's voice, when it finally evaded the leaden obstruction of his tongue, carried a dozen intonations, high among them what is happening and am I going mad, with a close third being taken by I literally cannot believe you. He took a shivery breath and forced himself to advance a step, just enough to put the mugs down on the table and let himself sink into a chair, before his suddenly-unreliable knees could deposit him on the tile. If there was a correct response he didn't know it. He didn't even know how to make the world go un-fuzzy at the edges.

"Zev." He swallowed thickly, and croaked a noise that was half laugh and half something he refused to contemplate, leaning back in his chair and looking up at him with that same lingering, distraught disbelief.

Edited (I am super-annoying and just like flooding your inbox with revisions.) 2013-04-10 04:27 (UTC)

There had to be something he could say or doe to make Jack look a little less broken. A little less hysterical. But he still did not quite felt right in a way and all that came to mind was to ever so casually lift a shoulder, as if he had not gotten himself killed during the draft after insisting that his boys be careful because it would be so very easy for any of them to die, as if he had not been gone for a week, as if he had not been a strange mess of anger and anxiety for the past few months before this mess.

As if things were not a good deal clearer for all that his head felt thick.

He lifted his shoulder, crooked smile spreading into something a little wider. A little sheepish. Faintly embarrassed, really.

"Miss me?"

That. Zevran just looking like he'd forgotten some sort of important date and was a bit embarrassed, but all things considered thought it was actually a rather minor concern. That was the hand in the proverbial side. Because while appearances and pet names and voices were one thing, that attitude was entirely another, and . . . Christ, Jack didn't actually know any more. Maybe Luceti had him doubting what his own eyes told him more than he'd ever realized, or maybe it was just his own penchant for skepticism that had chosen this of all possible times to be especially problematic. Regardless, his shock finally began to dissolve rapidly into a roiling mess of other feelings - bafflement and outrage, of course, but there were stranger things in there too. Renewed-but-abruptly-obsolete grief. Unreasonable terror that this was some illusion or dream, fated to end abruptly and mercilessly.

And joy. Joy was the strangest of all, and the one he was absolutely least prepared to feel cascading down on him in a too-slow acceleration, like all those chunks of concrete and steel in the slow-motion footage of a building being demolished.

"You- rgh, yes-" he interrupted himself, and although even inane and obvious questions needed answers, he found that even having to answer that in the first place had helped fuel the beginning of an impressive rant. He glared up finally, still overwhelmed but clearer, sharper. "-but, you . . . ngh. You bastard, you utter-"

That was the place where the accusations fit. The you died and the of all the hypocrisies and the do you have any idea what the last nine days have been like. But when he let loose, the most needling, most insulting thing of all shoved its way to the front.

"How long have you been here?" It was more demand, more declamation, than actual question. He wasn't even sure he wanted to know. "Here, in the bloody kitchen! All of us in this constant state of missing you, every. Damned. Day, and you're sitting here drinking a coffee in the other room like- like-!" He'd gotten to his feet at some point in all of that, and stood now, breathing visibly and fumbling for the next word in that chain of strident objections. But it felt good for a moment, to just be loud, to be upset with Zevran for being so never-endingly stupid.

Because everyone died, sooner or later. That wasn't the worst part. The torture came from never quite knowing if someone was alive.

Edited 2013-04-10 13:28 (UTC)

"...an hour?" He responded in a flat tone with a slow blink- and yes. Maybe he has been at the pot for so long he was a little drunk. The mostly empty bottle of brandy set next to the coffee pot was a solid indication of that. Nothing to eat and naught but coffee and brandy for want of forgetting that blank stretch of utter nothing that had been death. That had been the very thing he'd longed for once- the very thing Katniss threw herself bodily into. Something he'd stepped into without second thought for the sake of preserving the life of a man that he had no reason to believe would mourn him. He finished what was left in his mug and set it down- a little harder than he would otherwise and yes.

He was drunk.

And Jack was upset and that, that spurred life back into his limbs, light back into his eyes because Jack was upset and that was wrong on a fundamental level in his world, Jack was angry and frustrated and Eugene and Max were probably equally broken and he wasn't worth mourning didn't they know that but he was and he cannot simply wrap his mind around the fact that he was missed. And missed so very keenly. So he does not think on that, he pushed that all aside in favor of taking the few swayed steps from the counter to Jack to haul him in by the shoulders and just. Hold him.

Hold him and mumble into his shoulder in drunken Antivan that he was here, he was solid, and cling because this was not a fade dream. This was true, this was warmth and life and he'd missed it dearly without missing it at all.

"I did not wish to make a fuss. I am sorry."

An hour-! Jack gave a choked, indignant noise at that, but still could not think of any words, especially after the mug thunked to the table. He half expected a fight back, maybe even a slap, and he wouldn't have thought either unreasonable. He was being a tit and he knew it, carrying on about how Zevran handled having been dead when even brushing past the thing himself had made him a wreck for days. He braced himself as Zevran grabbed him, and found that strength doing nothing more than half-supporting a brandy-soaked embrace, propping up strong limbs gone clumsy and the weight of earnest-sounding words he could only understand in tone.

And then the apology, which bled all the fury right out of him - the apology, along with the increasingly powerful sweet-sharp smell of ethanol that came with Zevran close enough to breathe heat against his shoulder. Jack wrapped his arm around him in return, and it was terrible how much of the motion came on instinct, a desire to feel Zev snugged against him that had wormed down to the part of his brain so deep that it didn't even consider before reacting. Rubbing firmly along his back, he tucked his head in close, breathing the smell of coffee and liquor and clean skin with a guilty flush of comfort. Nothing dead, nothing otherworldly smelled like that, he was sure.

"Yeah, well. All right. But you're getting a fuss whether you like it or not," he muttered against his hair, passionless unhappiness sounding like something dangerously close to petulance. But even at the end of that he could feel a corner of his mouth struggling upwards, especially when he heard the familiar thump-thump of Eugene's crutch beginning to move out in the otherwise silent house. He wasn't sure about straight-up misery, but complicated emotional duress definitely loved company.

"Can we skip the fuss and go straight into relieved drinking? I may have a head start." He doesn't look up, does not want to look up. He was tired and he was oddly hollow but Jack was warm and alive and upset with him and there was a way to make it better, but he couldn't recall. All he could do was hold onto Jack and try not to list too far to one side.

He truly had far too much brandy in that coffee and too little in his stomach to start. His blessedly intact stomach. Perhaps it is the twisting sourness of bile and copper he wanted to forget, or the pain, or the blankness of the intervening days. He did not want to think of that and as such focused instead on the arms around him, the sounds of the house, and Jack's solid shoulder under his hear. The beat of his heart.

"Mocha and Nodo- are they well?"

"All in one piece," Jack reassured him quietly, in a tone that betrayed his own relief to even be able to say that, roaming hand drifting up into his hairline and skritching softly. "Upset, but on this side of the draft without much more than a few clinic check-ups."

All right, so it was a massive understatement of the way the last few days of the draft had actually transpired. Zevran wasn't in fantastic shape to be taking any of that news, and whether Jack liked it or not, there was a certain beautiful logic to relieved drinking and just being together again. But for safety's sake, he opted for steering Zev down into his recently-vacated chair, settling him into it with a grip used to supporting unsteadiness and a thoughtless prattle optimised for obscuring just how awkward these processes were.

"God, fine, I'll join you," he huffed, more wry than annoyed. Good, both thighs on the chair - both shoulders . . . hell, it was hard to stay objective and clinical and a little pissed off when he was leaning over Zev, maybe a foot from his face, just being saturated with how here he was. So he was drunk too, not to mention probably a bit the worse for wear. But who among them wasn't?

He swallowed, then questioned, voice dropping to the register that meant only uncertainty. ". . . I hope it isn't too soon to kiss you?"

"Good. I would hate for you three to take after my example." He mumbled. He was home, he was drunk, and for the moment he was tired of thinking. Jack could handle that for the moment. Wonderful, solid, horribly irritating Jack.

He shuffled into the chair without comment or complaint, though he did hook his fingers into Jack's sleeves to hold on for a little longer. Missed him without ever being able to miss him. Not that he begrudged Isaac's company and kindness in the end but the faces and final thoughts that lingered were of grey eyes and the scent of food. Of this house and the men that lived in it. The odd thing full of sentiment and sensuality that he had fallen into one December night after far too much rum.

Irritating. Vexing. Frustrating, that he wanted so much to put into words what it was he felt and remained terrified of it. Zevran blinked again, allowed Jack's face to slide into focus. "...I have brandy breath. Are you sure?"

As long as Zevran wanted to hold on, Jack had a feeling he was going to accept it. Especially after the last time Zevran had returned to them, Jack supposed he could take some idiocy. And inebriation. And . . . hell. All of it, every incomprehensible bit down to the sole objection being the possible offensiveness of his breath. He couldn't repress a soft huff of a laugh, letting his head hang down just a moment as he let that sink in. Brandy breath. Really.

"Let me think about that." He peeked up with a smirk, then straightened deliberately, hesitating a moment before walking away - all the way to the counter. With a deliberate twist he uncapped the brandy, and stepped back already taking a deliberate swig, wincing with the burn but swallowing a second one by the time he reached the table.

Enough pleasantries, then. Bottle on the table. Hand in the loose front of that sweater. And mouth against Zevran's, firm and steady, everything and nothing like before.

"You should. It is a very serious affliction." Something close to a joke, the first that had come to mind since he'd woken up half naked in the woods. Which he did not wish to think about. He did not wish to think of anything, truly. Just wished to lean against Jack and breathe and try not to let the leaden weight of his limbs leave him overly clumsy.

There was a faint sound, something close to a whine that left his throat when Jack pulled away. Now he had to hold himself up. There was nothing to support him but the chair's back and that was not nearly as comfortable or comforting as Jack. He attempted and failed to cling to him and was far too heavy to try to go after him. Jack would come back. He had to. He'd missed Zevran, after all, so he would come back.

Another faint sound of mewling, grumbling irritation when Jack so callously swigs his brandy right from the bottle. Mumbled slur of 'you sip it not swig it' before what exactly Jack was after clicked. Zev felt quite slow- in as much that it didn't truly click until Jack's lips were on his and the flush of warmth in his chest offered far more than any sultry, sordid intent. Aside from an appreciation for Jack's forward approach and a mild enjoyment of the softness of his lips, Zev was not otherwise moved.

Odd.

Drunker than he thought.

The kiss was supposed to be more of a gesture or symbol than anything - a show of the things that, even if Jack had been eloquent enough to vocalize, he had a worry that Zevran might not really want to hear. That was its only saving grace, that it had another component than connection, because something intangible but unsettling just did not click the way it should have. Which honestly made sense, in an unfortunate way. Even losing a leg had made Eugene withdrawn and unwilling to touch for an unwelcome length of time. Dying - and not just dying, being killed . . . well. Jack couldn't say he would have been feeling very frisky, either.

So he swallowed quietly and gave Zev his breathing room again, huffing a chagrined noise of not-quite amusement as he leaned his head onto his shoulder. ". . . yeah, probably too soon." He gave his neck a rueful look, then pecked it lightly, bowing lower to get under his arm, unconsciously taking to the left. Most things were easier when you had an old model to follow. "This is probably a state better experienced on the couch, anyway. Come on."

He had enough of a mind to enjoy it- to react in as much that he slides a hand up to cradle Jack's cheek and just settle into the contact. To lean after him just a little when he finally pulled away. Brandy breath on both of them and far too many things that probably needed to be said. Neither were in the mind to do so, and might not ever. Zevran had no wish to think on it.

"Never too soon." He mumbled into Jack's hair, curling his arms around him to clean. The brush of lips against his neck made him huff a breathless laugh, ticklish. It had never been ticklish before. Not that he had the time to think this over as it seemed as though it was time to move. "Drunken sprawls on sofas are favored, yes."

Zevran kept chasing contact, at least. That was more of a relief than Jack wanted to admit, even if it was a vaguely guilty one. There'd been a quiet fear that if he even came back at all Zevran would return to them different, a person with no need of a house and no patience for humans who were always asking where he was and what he was doing. Jack wasn't too proud to take what touches and responses he can get, and he returned Zev's laugh with an automatic little smile of his own, straightening and pulling him along to the living room.

"Oh - we cleaned up your things. Well, everything but the clothing." It seemed like the sort of thing that needed to be said, before he went out tomorrow and started searching for his things in the shop. "We had no idea how to do repairs, but we figured out the requisite cleaning and oiling kind of business."

His stride continued to be somewhat staggered, a fluid chaotic lack of coordination that had him settled mostly along Jack's side. It was as though admitting to himself that he was drunk allowed him to stop pretending to be sober. Ish. It wasn't the best act of sobriety he'd done but it'd been better than this. Settled and slumped and bumping into Jack's shoulder and hip until he saw the sofa and aimed a swaggered slip of a step for that, not quite tripping into place or stepping and sitting down; rather pouring himself from a standing position into a boneless, graceless sprawl over the cushions.

He made it.

That was worth something.

"The dagger. The one Isaac used-" He swallowed. Licked his lips and blinked slowly at the ceiling to crawl back from that skittering blankness that lingered in the back of his mind. "To. End it. Is that in the house?"

Jack had just settled down onto the cushions alongside Zev's waist, stretching out for a nice spot of lazing alongside him while he drifted though his haze of coffee-buoyed drunkenness, when that question came.

He went still.

"...Isaac?" For a long, terrible second, none of the component parts of that question fit. They spun around and jammed and ground against each other like ill-fitted gears, spitting sparks and throwing off sharp filings of metal and God, he'd touched it, he'd sat there alongside Eugene and meticulously cleaned the thing without once imagining that it had-

"Why - bloody . . . why would Isaac-? To you, I mean, he-" He felt sick, not acutely but in the crawling, prickling, cold-sweat way. It was in the house, sitting right alongside Zev's boots and he's not sure he wouldn't have flung it off the edge of the damned island if he'd known.

Even with as drunk as he was- as fuzzy as drink and strangeness had left his head he could feel the moment when everything in Jack ground to a halt and began to whirl about like broken winged birds. Strung so tight and flickering, flailing, Zev rolled to brace himself above him. Literally used his weight as a reminder that he was alive now, that this was not something to be taken lightly. He had to straddle Jack's waist to do it, but straddle he did with no thought whatsoever to the consequences.

"Jack- Argento. Bello-" Amore. Something that went unsaid but was so very audible in the gentleness of his tone, the warmth of his tired eyes, the weight he put behind the endearment. Something he was terrified to say but wanted to in his own way. He swallowed, smoothed a hand along Jack's cheek to sooth him, and spoke the rest carefully. "I asked him to."

Please. He had said please. And Isaac had been so kind as to grant him that much. For a moment he was braced above Jack, lost to the memory, lips soundlessly working over that faint plea. They shaped the word before he blinked himself back into the present, resolved to explain. This Jack needed to know, and his voice leveled out, gravely serious. He took one of Jack's hands and rested it over his abdomen, where that ragged wound had been hidden by his leathers.

"Here. I was gutted and dying from a wound here." He had to pause a moment, remember the blood, remember the pain, and push on. "...I was beyond all saving. I know death. I know wounds. And I know how long it takes to die from such wounds and the one I had it...it would have taken an hour to bleed out and die."

An hour spent bleeding into the dust. Dying like Rinna but so much slower.

"A long. Painful hour. What Isaac did for me I asked him to do. It was a mercy. It was quick, it was clean." That hand was dragged up from his abdomen to rest over his beating heart. With eyes and voice he begged Jack to understand. In some way, in some part of his mind to be able to comprehend what Zevran asked and Isaac granted.

"One blow, here, that I barely felt. It was mercy, Jack."

Edited 2013-04-14 08:08 (UTC)

He asked. That was the one crucial part Jack had been unable to imagine, but he believed it instantly, settling in a way that even Zevran's endearments or shape atop him hadn't entirely managed. He was still for a moment longer, simply remembering to breathe, to feel something besides incredulous horror. Then he remembered that Zev was touching his cheek, and he turned into his palm with a quiet sigh of acceptance and a look that gentled from appalled disbelief to listening quiet. Because without another word of explanation, he knew the basic shape of that circumstance. He'd already seen people who wanted to live, and wanted it desperately enough to fight overwhelming odds, succumb to inevitable fact and ask only that the end be brief. Zev's eyes went distant for a moment and he let him go to that wordless place, let himself be moved when he returned, just let himself exist in that oddly comforting place where Zevran was directed and impassioned and towing him through a thing he already half-knew.

He flexed his fingers through the hanging weight of the sweater to the lean strength of Zev's stomach underneath, mind swaying from complacency to that prickling illness again as recognition lit in his eyes. That had been the first, then - the terrible wound that had stretched and gaped like a toothless mouth when they'd wrestled his armour off, heavy and open without leather or living muscle to bind it in. An hour of lying with that in him, and only going once he'd bled enough. He nodded numbly, thoughtlessly, and only released his breath when his palm settled on Zev's chest.

He wouldn't have thought Isaac to be the merciful type. But if he had, then . . . well. In the part of his mind that was still (would always be, he feared) at Abel, he thought that at least something had gone right.

". . . yeah," he murmured, and he wasn't humouring him at all. It was good of Zev to be so emphatic with him, but he got it, and it was an honest relief, knowing that at least he hadn't suffered. That he'd been with someone decent at the end. He left his hand where it was a moment longer, then wormed it out from beneath Zevran's grip to curl around the juncture of his neck and shoulder in a firm grip, a steadying grip. "That's good. Really."

He wasn't certain what worried him more. That he would have to explain this to Jack- or that Jacked seemed to understand him so readily. All their fears and preparation, all their insistence that they can protect themselves, that they are capable- these are not concerns of common people asserting that they might be of use in battle. These are concerns of those that have endured something. Some horror. Something of which they have not spoken and perhaps if he were not so weary he might ask after it. For now he let himself be held and took the invitation for what he saw it to be. One to settle atop Jack entirely, not at all unlike a drunken Elvish blanket, and rest.

He huffed a faint, weary laugh into Jack's chest once he was down. Mumbled something sad and rough and inarticulate in Antivan before he corrected himself since the Wings apparently did not speak drunken Zevran. "I used the same dagger earlier in the week to kill her again. Rinna. I was caught in one of those...shift. Dreams.

It felt like it was real and I so wished it to be. She was warm and alive and everything I'd missed and I'd forgotten all that came after. The Warden, the Blight- this place. You and Eugene. And to escape I had to kill her again."

Zev was heavier than he looked, but still lighter than Jack thought he remembered him being, the last time he'd been in a position to be lying on him in a not-entirely-dissimilar way. Jack frowned at that, finger-combing his hair away from his face and, on an impulse, lifting a section from that spot halfway up his temple. It seemed like as good a thing to do as any, with his own mind running a steady, distracting background current of dark thoughts and Zevran just beginning to mutter against his shirt in that pretty, half-incomprehensible language he spoke.

He'd picked the chunk into three sections and begun to braid when Zev apparently started again. Jack paused, looking down at him, still caught in that quiet that he knew wasn't like him. But this was something he couldn't prattle over, even if he'd wanted to. Not what had happened to Zev at the end, and not what he had apparently gone through before that.

Something small and sharp twisted in Jack, and bloomed rapidly like a weaponised fern, all irrational sharp edges and venom. At least after his own run-in with those things, he'd come home in one piece. But Zevran had died anyway, within days of the thing. It was beyond senseless, beyond cruel, and he let go of Zev's hair to just wrap his arms around him and hold on tightly.

"God, I hate those guys" he muttered, tenor dropped about as low as it went and all the proper edges of his accent sharpened to dangerous points. "I mean, I already did, but this takes it into that inappropriate fixation kind of territory. The sort where you have daydreams about them catching fire."

"Mmm. Fire's a bit quick for what I would like to do to them. Were it not wearing her face I think I might have taken my time with acid and my garrote wires." He could be terribly creative if given time, and he was drunk enough to let his mind wander along those bloody paths. Without a filter those thoughts tumbled out, sanguine little gems of painful intent. Things he'd done. Things he would probably do again. Things which he was thoroughly accustomed to doing and discussing even when curled close with a lover. He tilted and twisted his head to nuzzle Jack's shoulder, eyes half closed and voice a lazy carving of razor edged violence.

"It is not unlike peeling the skin from a carcass- You start with a cut at the collar and work the wire in between the skin and flesh there. Apply the acid in small doses- not so strong as to strip the flesh but strong enough to eat away at fat and blacken the blood into a jelly. It makes it easier to scrape off your knife as you work. From there you peel down to the waist or along the arm, making as few cuts as possible. They will twitch and scream and it will be very noisy if you are working correctly. If they pass out you've gone far too quickly. Let them rest, let the acid do it's work and if it is done slowly enough they survive until all that's left is around the face and neck. Always leave that last, I was told, and for a long while I wondered." Like one would wonder after the weather or a particular woman's taste in dinner and dresses. He made a low, thoughtful noise in the back of his throat and shrugged. "I suppose it makes the situation all the more horrifying. I would do that- or I would use one of my favorite poisons."

He sighed. Nostalgic, if anything. It was a beautiful thing, the corrosive effects of his favored poison. "To an elf? Nothing. But to a man, to whatever those might be? It slowly renders them numb, bit by bit over the course of an hour. Then they lose the ability to move, fragile blood vessels in the eyes, nose, ears, and mouth dissolve- and while paralyzed they drown as their lungs fill with their own blood. It takes days."

After the first sentence, Jack expected Zev to be done. Similarly after the second, and the third, until he was halfway through a lovingly detailed description of how to skin a man alive and too horrified to even raise his voice. But even when he felt like he could, he didn't. A small, sneaky tendril of thought countered that torture was exactly what these things did to them - placing them in situations where they had to chose to die or betray themselves, situations where the kindest and the most trusting were the most certain to be killed. Where was the wrong in torturing a torturer, in killing a killer?

He swallowed slowly, and when he laughed it escaped with a faintness, a shakiness that hadn't been there before. It was a sound made entirely of bravado, and bereft of pleasure. Even for loathsome things like these enemies, he didn't have the stomach for murder, at least not the slow kind.

"Christ . . . Zev. Warn me before you start up like that, all right?"

"...I'm sorry." He murmured, turning to curl his fingers in Jack's hair. Nuzzled into his neck and took a deep breath before apologizing properly. "I try not to be so...so much the Crow around you, Max, and Eugene. It is why I do not wish for you to see me work. Why I do not explain much of my past in detail."

Why he spent time with Isaac. Isaac understood without much comment or question, could laugh with him, admire the viciousness of a technique and still look at him the same way afterward. Zevran was thoroughly aware that he had frightened Jack, and at a loss as to how to fix that.

"I'm sorry. I won't in the future. I...I won't."

"-what?"

Jack hadn't been angling for remorse at all, and blinked, wiggling back in an attempt to look at Zev properly. Silencing people was really not a part of his modus operandi, and having that be the take-home message of 'warn me next time' bothered him more than he cared to admit.

"Zev- hey. No," he insisted, inelegantly but firmly. The whole thing still unsettled him, but . . . that was Zev, there, just as much as any of the pretty parts. Even if Jack hadn't always been the wisest in love, he'd at least been around long enough to know that nothing good came of pretending that some aspects of people just weren't there. He tried for a little smile, ducking his head in an effort to catch the elf's eyes. "Come on. What did I say about this protecting-me-from-yourself crap?"

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tw for graphic descriptions of torture

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