Exaudi meam causam~
Ethan poured milk into the bowl with trembling hands, and it frothed and sloshed. Life. Milk was life, milk was the beginning, the first gift you received after the lifespark. The first gift you were alive to take. Janus was beginnings, too. This would be a beginning.
Randall was dead. Death was also a beginning. Every time Ethan closed his eyes he saw their magics twining around Randall, around Eyghon as the skin of humanity flaked off. He saw what he'd seen that night, when the demon's bulging eyes had shown each one of them their own deaths. And it had called to him, the death in Eyghon's eyes, and Ethan had taken an unwilling step towards their dead friend just before the magic backfired and killed him. It was Ethan's fault. His longing had broken the spell.
Awareness had come slowly that night, while he'd screamed his throat raw. Awareness, and a desperation. But it would have to wait, wait until after the funeral. He had to purge his body of the taints that filled it. He had to be as pure as milk for the ritual.
It wasn't until that night that Rupert came to him. Too late, far too late. He'd begun already, the words and the pain of the ritual burning into him deeper and deeper, and it had been a shock when Rip threw open the bedroom door and walked in. He brought with him his sorrow, his own gift, ready to open himself to Ethan so they could begin to grieve. The entrance of his lover sent little needles through the air, and Ethan laughed in his face.
He hadn't wanted to. He'd wanted to burrow down into that embrace, to pour himself out on the altar of Ripper and be born anew. But all he could do was laugh and choke, and drag the knife down his arm slowly. The dedication had begun and the end of the world wouldn't stop it now. His blood spilled into the copper bowl, mingling with the ashes and the herbs and staining the milk of beginnings, and the two-faced statue of Janus laughed the way Ethan laughed and cried the way Ripper cried and he suddenly knew that this was his sacrifice, oh god, god in heaven help me have mercy have mercy please and he couldn't help the inside of him that was screaming the prayers of his childhood, desperate, oh god please Christ please holymarymotherofgodprayforus - and Janus took him, and filled him and broke him and chaos was the beginning and the end, and Rupert was screaming and he'd been so right when he'd realized that after Randall he either had to embrace it or flee and Janus was inside of him and they were in bed and Rip's sweat tasted like victory and they were gods they were gods, didn't he understand? And it was his first time and it hurt and he was hurting Rupert but it was good, so good that he was laughing or was he screaming or was it Rupert, Ripper, Rupert did it matter and they were only kids so how could they be damned for this, they were only children.
Now and in the hour of our death.
Death was a beginning.
Janus was death.
When he opened his eyes again, the face that swam into view was Rupert's, and he was being held in those strong, comforting arms. There were tear-tracks on his lover's cheeks. Ethan giggled, and his laughter was high and empty.
"I thought you were going to die," Rupert whispered. His voice was rough, and Ethan realized what it would have done to him to see such a thing, so soon after Randall. His pain was beautiful, and it filled something empty inside of Ethan. Something that Janus had emptied, had drunk up. His true sacrifice.
"I did," giggled the newly-born priest of Chaos.
Ripper sighed, stroking his hand gently through Ethan's hair.
"I know." His hand tightened in the strands momentarily, and Ethan winced. Rupert resumed his gentle strokes, and the sorcerer allowed himself to relax again, reveling in the crackling darkness dancing through all of his veins.
"I know."
~Carpe noctem pro consilio vestro
Veni, appare et nobis monstra quod est infinita potestas.~
The first time Rupert Giles saw his other side again was five years later. Five years of arms that had stayed empty, five years of fearing that he'd been ruined completely. And then he walked into his kitchen, and there was Ethan, waiting for him. Rupert was wearing tweed, and Ethan laughed again. And it was so hateful, and Rupert felt his face twist up, remembering that night.
And from the sadness in Ethan's eyes, he knew that they were both remembering.
"I'm sorry," Ethan whispered, his hands hidden in the pockets of his jeans. Rupert wondered if he would still know the scars and lines on them as well as he knew his own, wondered how much the years had altered those familiar fingers.
"No you're not."
"No, I'm not."
There was silence, while Rupert glowered. He saw himself reflected in his onetime lover's eyes, and saw that in them he looked...old. Used up. A bit of roadside trash.
"So Rip-"
"Ethan, don't."
"You sound like my father." Rupert winced, mostly at the tone but also because he really did. "You look like him too," Ethan added with a sneer. And then there was the rage, the blind young fury that had driven him for so many years. He'd thought that the Council had burned it all out.
"Fuck off, Ethan."
"Druther fuck you."
Rupert Giles watched his ex lover as he leaned elegantly against the kitchen counter of the drab, run-down flat that Rupert's Council stipend barely paid for. Ethan was thin, much thinner than he'd been before. His clothing hung on him. It was as though the flames of Janus were eating him from the inside out, and it made Rupert feel vaguely ill. He closed his eyes, and the sick, dizzy feeling went away.
It came back when he tried to look at Ethan closely again, but he stared anyway.
"Are you glowing?"
Ethan seemed to be drifting, watching him with a small, strange smile. An odd, bubbly noise came from the general vicinity of his WC. Later Rupert would discover that all of the lids on the bottles in his medicine cabinet had popped off.
"He shouldn't have broken the circle," Ethan said sadly, though that same damn smile was still on his face. "We all knew what could happen."
Maybe he was just trying to share his grief. Maybe it was the only way he could talk about it. Maybe, maybe, maybe. But it was too many years too late, and quite suddenly Rupert found his fist buried in Ethan's gut while the younger man gagged and wheezed, bent double.
And he hit him, again and again, the hollow smacks echoing in the kitchen and more real somehow than the pain of his bruised knuckles or the rage. More real than the wet on his face when Randall's insides had blown outward. More real than his years with the Council. And Rupert was crying, and between the moans Ethan was still laughing, always laughing.
When they hit the floor Ethan's head smacked against the tile so hard that it shocked Rupert back to awareness. He pulled away, collapsing against the cabinets and watching in horror as Ethan coughed wetly and curled up on his side, blood bubbling from his mouth.
"Damn....Rip."
"Oh god," Rupert scrabbled to his feet, "Oh, god. I should -"
"Don't you feel alive?" Ethan pushed himself up on one arm, spitting more blood. Suddenly, the bare light bulb that hung above the kitchen table burned out.
"God," Rupert whispered into the darkness.
"Not quite. But close,"
The kiss tasted like copper, and it sparked right from his lips to his groin. It was wrong, to take him like that. On the kitchen floor, in the pool of his own blood. It was as wrong as anything Rupert had done in the before, in the beginning. Ethan whimpered and cried and begged the whole time Ripper fucked him. And Ripper was glad, because Ethan had finally stopped laughing.
~Persona se corpum et sanguium commutandum est~
"What do you want?"
Giles tried to keep his voice deep, angry. But he lost that battle when he saw himself mirrored in the bruises that covered Ethan's face. They were probably worse, under the clothing. He wanted to be sick. They let him work with children...
"I'll probably be pissing blood for a week, Rip. Didn't know you still had it in you."
"Shut up, Ethan. I thought you'd left."
"Tried," Ethan grinned weakly, most of his weight on the doorframe. "Couldn't, though. You've got something of mine."
Rupert Giles snorted, turning back into his flat and listening carefully as Ethan stumbled in after him. The sorcerer lowered himself with a grunt that was very nearly a stifled yell.
"And what would that be?" Giles continued the banter, as he retrieved a first aid kit from his bathroom. So empty. So easy. So...routine.
"Would you believe my heart?"
"No." Giles smirked, kneeling before Ethan and beginning to dab at the cut on his cheek with a washcloth. The younger man winced, and Giles couldn't help but echo the movement.
"You almost got my Slayer killed, tonight," he said quietly, and when he looked up into those dark eyes they glittered with the same remote fire that had nearly consumed his lover the night after Randall's funeral. "What were you trying to accomplish?"
Ethan shrugged. Sometimes Giles wondered if even Ethan knew what drove him, if he could even begin to understand the consequences of his own actions. Or perhaps he was aware of every consequence, and simply didn't care. A cool hand sliding up his inner thigh interrupted the train of thought. Rupert caught it gently, and put it back on Ethan's knee. The younger man went very, very still, and Giles looked up at his deaths-head grin.
"I hate them," he said.
Giles sighed, scrubbing his hand through his hair.
"As you hate me, yes, I expect so."
"No," Ethan whispered. "I only hate your shadow. You hate him, too. You hate the Watcher as much as I do, Ripper. He's not your soul, you've cut it off and it's dying, and if you'd only listen to me-"
"You don't know what you're talking about, Ethan."
"They have you!" the sorcerer yelled, and Rupert jumped backwards, falling onto his backside.
"They have you, and I don't! I never will, because they took you away from me! You were mine!" And Giles was afraid, suddenly, in a way he hadn't been afraid of Ethan in ages. His eyes were dark and glittering, and the static electricity prickled through the air. A mirror hanging on the wall fell, and exploded when it hit the ground. One after another, every picture or mirror or mask Giles had put up in an effort to make the flat more palatable slid to the floor in a series of bangs that made him jump again and again and again. He remembered, then, why it wasn't wise to look carefully at the younger man, how it made you sick because there was something about him that the human mind couldn't grasp, and how the quivering in the fabric of reality only went away when he would dive at him with fists and mouth and when they rolled together across the bed. In those moments, Ethan was his whole world. And he hated it.
When he uncovered his eyes, Ethan was gone again. Giles walked through every room of his flat, locking the doors and the windows, and starting the clocks again. It wasn't until he'd set it all to rights that he could stop shaking. Only then, he began to cry.
~Vestra sancta praesentia concrescet viscera.~
The straps allowed him no movement. There were bedsores on his back and on his ass, and most of the time Ethan didn't care. Most of the time he was drugged enough that it was difficult to focus even on the steady litany in his head. Jane pater, te hac strue obmovenda bonas preces precor only it was stupid, just stupid for he had no bread to offer and no wine, and it was a simple desperate attempt to garner the least bit of attention uti sis volens propitius mihi domo familiaeque meae. It was really only in the few interspersed moments of clarity, when he was fully conscious of the feeding tube in his nose and the whiteness of the place and the things they did with their gloved, sterile hands, that he could truly find the strings that bound him to his god and pluck them.
Sterile. Ordered. Chaos had no place here and it was so difficult to bring it. But it wanted, it hungered. And he would have managed to bring disorder to this scientific world long since save that inside, he was dead. And what killed him hadn't been the order, not the stifling, not the fact that he hadn't taken a piss by himself in months. Not even the fact that no soul had spoken to him even once since his arrest.
Ripper had sent him here to die and he was, as ever, the obedient boy.
They put the mask over his face and the anesthesia began to pump through the tubes. He'd been waiting for this, for the happenstance of a minute slip in an assembly machine months ago that left a loose staple in the cuff that held his arm down. Such a tiny, tiny movement, a mild rocking and it cut him. The blood flowed sluggishly, but it was flowing. His offering. Jane pater, macte istace libatione pollucenda esto, and he felt the shifting of possibilities and realities and the slight twist that had led the tube of this mask to be slightly ruptured, that the anesthetic flowed out and not into his lungs, filling the air with something flammable. Macte vino inferio esto.
Chaos, what Ripper had never fully understood. All was chance, all was coincidence. This world of order was about to be finished. The doctors were checking something, and the living wine was running more freely from his punctured wrist. A nurse noticed it. Father Janus, may you be strengthened by this libation. Quickly, quickly now, before she could do something. A doctor hit one of the switches. All it took was a tiny spark. One tiny crossed wire. One in a million. May you be honored by this wine.
The operating theater exploded into an inferno. And then Janus was there, enfolding him, loving him, cradling him and Ethan was off the table and scrabbling away. The air scorched his lungs, burned away his eyebrows and the long lashes. He hadn't moved in ages, and he kept overbalancing, crashing into tables. He sucked in a breath, and fire followed it. He could feel it inside of him, curling, rejoicing.
In the conflagration, Ethan threw his head back and screamed.
"Janus! Take the night!"
And on a tower, far away, a young woman jumped.
And a Watcher watched Benjamin die.
And a soldier was lifting his gun.
And the house that Randall had died in was being demolished.
And a new mother was bleeding out.
And a six year old was shot.
And someone was having sex for the first time.
And someone was raped.
And someone was picking up his first gun.
And someone was praying.
And someone
And...
And...
And...
And they were all inside of him and he was inside of them and Janus was the beginning and the end and it all led back to Chaos, his dark father his grasping mother and the love that he gave up to have this future, this present, and Ethan was screaming. Screaming yes, yes, yes. And it was his rebirth.
And it was time to pay his old lover a visit.
~I remain, as ever, thy faithful, degerate son~