Work Text:
what are you going to do
when the knocking in your chest
turns into the ticking of a timebomb?
At the end of the ninth night, right before dawn, Nina pulls Iver down from his gallows. Snaps the ropes and the chains, pulls out the hooks pinioning what should never taste iron beyond its own blood, brushes her hands over the already mending burns scorched into what should never see sunlight.
He is alive, she thinks. He doesn't look like it, but there's no other way for him to be, which means he must be alive. No matter the signs. Never mind the signs.
Nina recognises it, the aftermath of becoming. And she has questions, yes. Questions, and criticisms, and a whole lot of rage.
But that will wait. First things first.
Nina carries Iver to their hideout, and the floppy uncoordinated motherfucker doesn't help one bit. The only thing he appears to be good at right now is smearing blood and gunk all over her, leaving her skin slippery and sticky, like he finally got the memo and decided to cling to her in turn. Like this is the only way he can do it now. It's hard to carry him, with all the flaps of skin hanging loose from his back, with the ribcage a wreck of pearly bones and minced meat spilling lungs out into the open, spoiled blood flaking in pre-dawn air. When Nina glimpses Iver's heart, cowering alone in the darkness of the wreckage, it doesn't beat.
Safely inside, in the simmering morning light peeking through the drawn curtains, Nina washes him, as much as she is able with the trickle of stale water from groaning pipes, just to get the worst of the dirt off. Distracts herself with imagining how much he is going to bitch if a stray piece of grime gives him an itch he can't scratch. He is cold and limp thoughout, eyes still half-lidded and dull, not a twitch of a single muscle betraying that he even registers Nina's manhandling of his insides. Extremely unhelpful, still.
She keeps working, calling up her memories of textbooks and cadavers. Pours the slurry of lungs back into the chest cavity, lobe after lobe, watching them freeze around the drown-stone weight of Iver's heart. Coaxes the ribs back in place, popping each into the row of dips along the vertebrae — they don't give when she tries to pull just to test them, joint surfaces hiding themselves shyly away under freshly woven connective tissue — smooths out the folds of skin, wrinkles etched into them where the flaps were pulled taut against their habit.
(There is some kind of relief to this. He really is alive — the new kind of alive. She didn't just wish it so, although Nina would claw her way into making reality bend to her wish if she had to.)
Iver's body mends itself now. He is no longer fragile. Yet Nina watches hawkishly until the scars stop moving and settle into their patterns. Until the last of the sunburns fade into dark pinpricks of freckles.
He is so fucking scruffy. His hair is longer too, falling in a matted mess over his sunken face no matter how many times Nina brushes it away. Like he didn't spend barely over a week out there. Like he was gone for much longer.
Nina pats his body dry and lays it out on the bed before flitting off to check the drapes covering the windows. She's had enough sun for a lifetime, and despite the early hour the air is already acrid with heat. Checks done, she hurries back, spurred on by the nagging fear that she can't place until she sees Iver again, still laid out exactly the way she left him. Too still for her liking, but there. It will have to do.
Cautiosly, Nina crawls onto the bed and stretches out along Iver's naked side to study his face from up close.
He looks haggard. Shadows lie deep and sharp under his eyes and cheekbones. His skin, which used to be so pale and thin, is now weathered and leathery from the sun in some places, glossy and pink from burns in others. A chimera, suspended.
His eyelids flutter, as if he senses the needlepoint of Nina's attention on him. When he finally lifts them, gaze aimless and vague, the weeping redness of burst blood vessels isn't a surprising sight. The icy blue of his irises is starker against he mottled red.
But it's his left eye that catches Nina's attention. What had previously been only a pinprick of an extra pupil, a mole of a digested twin trying to hide away among the strobes of Iver's iris is now swollen and full, pulling and tearing itself away from its sibling in a garment of pale blue. Two pupils, two blending irises, slowly shifting across the sclera in an orbiting dance.
Nina leans over Iver, looks him in the eye — or tries to — and after a moment of blank contemplation, Iver seems to focus. Nina touches his cheek to keep his attention, and it's soft with the scruff that wasn't there before.
"Hey. Do you remember anything?" She resists the urge to call his name. He won't get any hints. She needs to know for sure.
Iver blinks slowly. She doesn't know if it should count for an answer.
"Do you remember your name?" she tries again.
Nina never remembered hers. She stole the one she has. There isn't much left of her previous life — and what she does sometimes feel outline itself below the surface, she doesn't like, and so she doesn't look closer. She likes herself too much for this.
For her, it is a choice. But what if Iver doesn't get one? What if he just…never comes back?
"Come on, give me something."
Iver watches her. Too quiet, too still aside from the dancing glide across the ballroom of his left eye. He was always so easy for her to read — at least to know that he is stuck mulling over something like a ruminating beast — but now the insight into his mind is shuttered. Nina has no idea what's going on in that head as he stares at her with the same blank sort of estrangement. The word itself — estrangement, a stranger, this is a stranger — feels too uncomfortably fitting, like a blade matching a wound it's dealt.
Finally, Iver's face softens, and he opens his mouth, and—
"Nina."
"That's my name," Nina scoffs, snarling away the sudden, nauseating burst of giddiness. "What about yours?"
Iver stills again. The two pupils grow closer and pull apart, inspecting her. Nina fights off a scowl. Someone's definitely home, of that much she is certain now. But what he is thinking remains frustratingly shrouded.
"You found me." Iver's voice is raspy, air travelling over serrated tissue, snagging on the tears in it.
This time, Nina does scowl. Not quickly enough. Though she wonders, as her gaze dashes from scar to scar, bands dug deep into Iver's flesh by the bonds he was hanging from, if she was simply not allowed to find him sooner. The thought sits ill with her. She doesn't do the whole "not being allowed" thing.
When did he learn to play her like this? When did she grow so tame? The thought alone makes her want to tear something apart. Him, maybe. Undo all this work, dig new gouges into his flesh. Leave him with a reminder not to try this shit again. He won't even die from this as easily now — maybe she should indulge.
But Nina settles for grinding her teeth. "Duh. Idiot."
Iver's mouth twitches. His eyes close again. "Thank you."
Just like that, Nina is defanged again — bloodily so, violently, in contrast with the quiet serenity of Iver's expression. He is so fucking chill about it all. As if she didn't spend all these days and nights looking for him. As if she didn't carnage her way through the entire fucking city, over and over, until he was, like, revealed to her or something, like a Christmas fucking miracle.
Fucker. Fucker.
Motherfucker. She'll tear him a new one as soon as he comes back to himself enough to appreciate just how mad she is. Right now she…
Right now she just can't muster the ire for it, not for long enough.
Right now, she is simply too sick with relief to have him back where she can see him.
"Iver—" she shuts up immediately, realising her mistake, but it's too late. Iver's mouth twitches again — a smile. Nina bristles.
"Where were you?" she asks.
A shadow of a frown, the expression of emotion finding the grooves of his wrinkles, testing them like a glove's fit.
"More of a…when, I think," he muses. Then, before Nina can probe him, "Long. Too long."
This isn't meant as an insult, Nina doesn't think. The length of time she spent looking for him seems wholly, laughably irrelevant.
"What did you do?" Or maybe it wasn't him? Wouldn't be the first time shit just happened to him… "Or did someone…"
"I don't remember." Iver frowns again. His tone is soft, apologetic. "I'm sorry. I'm cold."
His skin is quiet, not a square inch of goose flesh in sight, but Nina chooses to interpret his words as a request anyway. She lies back down again and pulls and pushes to roll Iver onto his side and press him against her. He lets out noises as she move him, small, voiceless things to mark his discomfort, but he's just gonna have to deal with it. Consequences of his own fucking actions, and all that.
Iver feels cold to the touch. He was always so warm, but it's a different kind now, the clammy fever-heat of a curdling disease. Blood pulling away from the surface, simmering deep below. She needs to nestle closer now, burrow deeper so that she can feel it. His back is to her chest, like they've done so often. A habit, to engulf and to guard him, but the topography of the broad plane is all wrong now, raised skin and scar tissue between the slightly misaligned juts of shoulder blades where used to be only smoothness.
He isn't breathing. Nina tightens her arms around him, rubs her knuckles along his sternum. She remembers it, doesn't she? Twelve to twenty breaths per minute, on average. He taught her that. He taught her many things, and she remembers most of them — she may have spent a lot of time ogling the pretty professor, true, but she learned too.
"You have to breathe," Nina reminds him. Presses again. "Come on."
Iver's chest gives under her knuckles, then pushes into them. A false start, a stutter. She moves with him, making space as his rib cage expands, crowding back in jealously with the following collapse.
He doesn't have to breathe, does he though? Doesn't have to do anything anymore.
Nina bullies him anyway, hand on chest, squeezing him against her every time he takes too long to exhale the forgotten air. It's slow, repetitive. Gives her time to think.
What does she do now? Should she teach him violence, like she was taught? That he can do no wrong, ever, in her or his own eyes?
A blank slate, right? Like she was. (Right?)
('Look, look… She is perfect now.'
'No more fear. No more fear…'
'Look, she is perfect.')
They sang praises at her every move. Prostrated themselves in awe the first time she slaughtered one of them just to see what would happen. Cried in agony and ecstasy alike when she kept going, drunk on both blood and approval.
She could teach Iver that. Teach him how to be something he never was. Make him better, stronger, unburdened by the nonsensical net of human morals, so thin and flimsy and yet trapping them so securely that even those who pretend to be free still define themselves against its layout.
It would be so easy to show him the raw beauty of this freedom, to paint in broad strokes and slashes across the fresh canvas. To make him, finally, understand.
It would be so easy.
Iver turns around in her arms.
"Fuck me."
"What?" Nina asks, drawn in by the slow, nauseating spinning.
"My body, it's all…" Iver tenses his shoulders. Deep inside, something clicks, and he winces. "I need to feel normal. I need something normal. Fuck me. Please."
In any other case, Nina would scoff and balk and turn her nose up at the idea of anything that has to do with her being relegated to the realm of "normal". But nothing about this situation is normal, whuch makes everything contained within it not normal either. So it's fine. She'll let it slide.
Nina nods. Iver rolls her over easily, and she is too surprised by this show of newfound strength to consider if she should allow it. Her guard has always been down around Iver — soft, weak, humanly harmless Iver — should she change that now? She doesn't think so. She doesn't want to. She won't.
It's easy to join them — Iver is already naked, and it's quick work to get Nina exposed enough to leave nothing between them. Iver cries out, stifled and broken, as he sinks onto her, hands braced on her chest, and Nina tries not to swatch the sound against her imagination. It helps no one if she wastes time trying to guess how he sounded when his body was being carved open. It only makes her feel worse.
Instead, she grabs his hips and pulls him down in a mean, fluid motion. He isn't fragile, not anymore, but even before all this she wasn't in the habit of holding back with him, and she doesn't now either. There is a tinge of desperation to him as he moves, a sense of a chase, and he easily matches her punishing pace even when she is sure her grip on his hips is tight enough to hurt.
Nina watches him unflinchingly, steadily. Watches for any signs, catalogues all reactions, compares them against her endless repository of everything Iver to find both the matches and the discrepancies.
"Do you still…?" Iver asks, cuts himself off, air stoppered in his throat. Another attempt, just as stillborn, "Am I still…"
"Yes," Nina replies. "Yes," she repeats firmer, underlining it with a thrust of her hips.
She doesn't care. Whatever happens from here on out, she refuses to care. She has what is hers, and she will never let go, which means that nothing can change either, not the important parts anyway, and beyond that it never mattered anyway.
Iver nods, hair falling in his face, obscuring his eyes. His fingers splay over her chest, looking for purchase.
Afterwards, they lie facing each other. The brief excitement, the strange unsettled state that gripped Iver is gone now, returning him back to aloof contemplation. When Nina tangles their legs together, he doesn't protest. Normally, he would still put up a customary fight now and again. Now, maybe he seeks out wha meagre warmth Nina can provide.
"I remember now," Iver mutters and looks away with a sigh. Nina watches his eyes travel, snag, travel again. Restless. Nistagmus of a rolling train car, tracks laid out into nothing. A when, not a where. "I love you."
She knows what he means. Neither of them does the whole love thing. They don't need it. They not-love each other. That still remains, even when she is mad at him.
Iver's orbiting pupils contract, relax again. The shadow of his frown deepens for a moment in reaction.
"What do you see?" Nina asks. If he's bothered by her lack of reply, he doesn't show it. If Nina is bothered by him not being bothered, she doesn't know.
"I…" Another frown, movement under the ice. His eyes find hers, three pupils outmatching two. "I didn't used to see much with this one," a minute tilt of his head to his left. "Now, it's still blurry, but…" Some kind of microexpression pulls on his face but he speaks again right after, "I see wounds."
"Wounds?"
"Yes, it's…" He chews on nothing. His eyes travel lower, to Nina's chest, the starbust of blackness in the middle of it visible above the collar. "It's blurry," he repeats, as if he forgot already. A downturn of his mouth. "Hard to focus. But I see it."
"I don't have a wound," Nina says dismissively. She doesn't. It's hard to deal her any damage, and what is dealt, she mends.
Iver shakes his head slowly. Damp strands of hair stick to his cheek, catch in his beard. "I can't tell the shape, or the site," he murmurs. "Nor…nor how to treat it," a note of distaste at that. "But I see it."
Nina wrinkles her nose. "Sounds useless."
She can change her body. Mould it however she pleases, make it exactly the way she wants it to be. The only thing she can't change is the black lines scorched into her skin, but that's nothing compared to what she can do.
And Iver gets to hallucinate, apparently. Nina would feel bad for him if she wasn't so irked.
Iver shrugs. "I suppose."
A moment of stillness, and then he shifts closer. Nina tips herself onto her back when his nose nudges her collarbone, and he settles again with his head on her chest and his arm placed carefully around her waist.
"I am so fucking mad at you," she whispers. He won't get off the hook — hah, augh — that easy.
"I'm sorry," Iver has the dignity to sound regretful. "I…don't remember why. I must've had a reason."
There it is, the slightly unbalanced wobble, a hint of a question lifting his voice at the end. Another break, another hair thin crack in this newfound detachment. A familiar self-consciousness echoing through.
Nina digs her claws into it. Squeezes his shoulder. "You fucking better."
"I can't have meant to hurt you."
He thinks too highly of himself, in that case. Also, the audacity. "Right."
Iver lifts his head. "Nina…"
"I should've snapped your neck instead." Instead of all of this. Instead of pulling him down, and bringing him home, and washing the rot out of his fullbody wounds.
Instead of hurting.
Iver pauses, lays his head back down. "Thank you."
Nina's face hurts. Her throat hurts, her chest hurts. Fucking hell. She hates this. "You're welcome. Sunk cost fallacy of a man."
Iver doesn't respond to that, but she feels his face move against her skin. The bastard is smiling again. At her waist, he rubs the fabric of her sweater between his fingers. The rest of him lies as a cold, dead weight on top of her.
Nina tightens her arm to squeeze his ribcage. "Breathe," she reminds him again.
Iver does.