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Feb. 23rd, 2019 11:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dantealighierinyarlathotwink on tumblr asked:
“What about the belladonna, did you get—”
“Yep.”
“And the deadly nightshade?”
“Right here.”
“Tallow candles?”
“Yes, I got the candles, Randolph. Jesus. Are you sure you’re all right with this?”
You certainly don’t look all right, Harley added to himself. He could see Randolph trying to hide it, perched on the kitchen island and swinging his feet a few inches off the floor in a vain attempt at nonchalance, but he was deathly pale, and Harley could see the skin on his knuckles stretched to whiteness with how hard he was gripping the marble counter. He looked like he might faint. (Not that that was uncommon, with him.)
But Randolph shook his head, squared his shoulders in a gesture that would have conveyed resolve in someone more sturdy but on him seemed more indicative of a kind of endearing, fragile bravery, and pried his fingers away from the counter. “I’m fine. Just…nervous.”
“You and me both.” Harley turned away from him, went back to setting out the candles. Thunder boomed outside, and he could have sworn he felt the foundations of the house— their house, he had to keep reminding himself— shudder with it. The ground wasn’t exactly sturdy here, in their century-old bungalow at the edge of the brackish South Carolina coastal marshland, but it hadn’t betrayed them so far. The rain— not here yet, but impending, judging by the heaviness and metal tang of the air outside and the low-hanging clouds glowing faintly green in the humidity— was another story.
They’d already done the sigils, earlier that day, chalked them into the damp salty floorboards and left them to settle. Basic pentagram, then some Harley recognized, then some he didn’t. Normally that would have unsettled him, but this was…different, because in this he had no expertise at all, beyond a basic understanding of the theory behind interdimensionality. He wasn’t used to relying so fully on Randolph in these sorts of things, and part of him was leery about it. It was the same part that insisted that Harley be the one to drive them places and handle their business dealings and carry Randolph up the stairs to bed when he’d fallen asleep at his desk— that looked at his partner’s small frame and mild manner and questioned how reliable could he be, really, especially in a crisis?
That part of him was stupid, usually, and Harley generally tried to ignore it. Still, it felt…uncomfortable, to not know precisely what it was that he was doing. Everything he knew about the occult told him that should be setting off alarm bells.
“Are you all right with this?”
Harley jumped a little bit as he was jerked out of his reverie. “What?”
It came out a little brusque, snappish, and Randolph cringed in a way that made Harley wince. “Sorry. You startled me.”
“It’s all right.” Randolph looked away, out the window, at the gathering storm. “I just— you seem a little on edge.”
“Oh, I’m on edge?” Harley asked teasingly.
Randolph flushed a little. “Not saying that I’m not, but—”
Harley crossed the room in a brisk few strides, abandoning the groundwork he’d been laying, and took Randolph’s waist in his hands. “Hm?”
Randolph swatted at him half-heartedly. “Stop that. You’re distracting the both of us”
“What, me? Never.” Harley gave him a little squeeze, and Randolph yelped at a pitch and volume completely inordinate for the amount of pressure applied. Harley smiled a little, to himself, and didn’t let go.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Randolph told him, with the smallest hint of a whine in it.
“Which was?” Harley leaned in, just a bit, so that Randolph had to tilt his head back to keep eye contact. (It had astounded him since they first met how really insubstantial he was, considering the sheer amount of stubborn willpower he managed to pack into that little body. You would think such evident vulnerability would have left him with rather more common sense, but apparently not.)
“Are you okay with this?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Harley.” Randolph pushed his hands away from his waist, and Harley let him. “Really.”
“Yes.” Randolph frowned up at him, and Harley took his hands in his. “Yes, doll, I am fine with this. I’m a tad nervous, but I trust you to keep us safe, and—”
“And?”
Harley leaned down and kissed him, then, with the kind of firm gentleness that he knew from experience made Randolph melt. It wasn’t a long kiss, but it was enough, and when Harley pulled back he saw Randolph with his eyes closed, a faint, sweet smile on his face. It took him a few moments to come back to himself.
“And I’m excited,” Harley murmured, when he did. “Now, is there anything else I need to know?”
+++
It was almost surprising, how fast preparations went. Sometimes Harley’s nerves (rare as they were) made things slow down, spread like taffy; sometimes, like now, it made them speed by. Before he knew it he and Randolph were standing in the circle together, shoulder to shoulder, the conglomeration of chalk sigils spreading out in perfect symmetry around them. The thunder boomed louder outside, though the rain still hadn’t arrived, and even their enclosed living room was heavy with the lack of air pressure and the scent of sharp ozone.
Harley lit the candles, one by one, while Randolph took out the parchment from his coat pocket and read it over one more time.
When they were first planning this ritual, months ago, Randolph had come across the obscure idea of a contract in his reading. It had been at a library…over there, so Harley had had no access to it, but Randolph had explained it to him from his notes.
“It’s like—” he’d sought for words for a few moments, and Harley did his best to quell his irritation— “like insurance, almost. You make a sacrifice, to prove your good faith and subservience to them, and they promise not to harm you while you pass through their domain.”
“Domain?”
“Like—” Randolph had gestured, vaguely— “the interstitial space, between here and there, and also here and everywhere. It’s— how it is is that it’s like reflecting pools in a garden.”
Harley had frowned. “How so?”
“We live in one pool. Where I go at night, that’s another. To get from here to there, I, and we, and everyone else has to come up out of the pool where we start, and cross the in-between space, and then dive into the pool where we want to go. Except the thing is that we’re like fish, kind of— we’re not suited to survive out there, and we’re not suited to survive in some of the pools, either, because some are fire, and some are acid, and so on. So when we cross the garden, on dry land, we’re vulnerable. It hurts us, and it’s hard.”
“Wait, so— are you saying we might die, in the crossing?”
“Well, yes. We might. But we have things to help us. That’s what the sigils I showed you are for, and that’s what this contract is for, because the things out there that live in the garden like to prey on us when we pass through their domain, and this is where they promise that they won’t.”
“Couldn’t they just—” Harley had rubbed his temples— “just eat us, or whatever, anyway? If they’re so much more powerful, like you always say?”
“They could.” Randolph had finished the last of his drink, set the wine-glass delicately on the table. “But that would ruin the fun, I think. They tend to enjoy the chase more than anything. Or so they tell me.”
Harley had shivered, then, even in the warm and civilized interior of Charleston’s nicest steakhouse. It had taken him until the end of their meal, when he was holding the door for Randolph on the way to the car, when he realized—
“Don’t you travel without a contract, then, every time you dream? What keeps them from getting you?”
Randolph had glanced up at him, then, with the daring glint in his eye that always made Harley worry. “I’m very fast.”
Harley shivered again, now, standing at the focus of the spiralling sigil. The contract in Randolph’s hands, every word chosen with neurosurgical care, suddenly looked very much like a fragile, meaningless piece of crumbling parchment.
He kicked himself for the sentiment. Thoughts matter here, Randolph had told him, more than anything else. The boundary between worlds is a pliable place, where the rules of our particular reality don’t apply in the same way. Thinking something might make it so.
Randolph drew his knife from the sheath at his waist, and handed it to Harley. “You do it. If I look, I’ll faint.”
One quick cut across the crook of Randolph’s elbow, one across the crook of his own. With Randolph still looking away, eyes squeezed tightly shut, Harley held the contract below both of their outstretched forearms, and let the blood drip down.
“Is it over?” Randolph’s voice sounded worryingly faint.
“Not yet.” Harley quickly bandaged Randolph’s arm, then his own, one-handed. “Now it is.”
“Good grief.” Randolph blew out a breath, squared his shoulders. “Contract?”
“Right here.” Harley handed it to him, and he took it with a surprisingly steady grasp.
“All right.” Randolph looked up at him. “Are you ready?”
Harley nodded, trying to conceal the pounding of his heart with a stiff upper lip. “Think so.”
Thunder crashed outside, lightning crackled across the luminous sky, and Randolph began to chant.
At first it was Latin, which Harley knew— something about a void, vacuum vacuorum, interstitium spatium orbium, terra siderium et deum— then Greek, which he wasn’t so familiar with, then— something that might have been Hebrew, or Aramaic, then— Egyptian?— then—
He didn’t recognize the language after that, and he didn’t think Randolph did either. Something had come over him. His hair, loose reddish-blond curls, wasn’t standing on end from electricity (which would have at least been understandable, considering the storm), but floating, as if he were in free fall, or zero gravity. There was— and it might have been the light from outside, but somehow Harley doubted it— a faint glow to his skin, something silvery and strange. Gingerly, Harley reached out to touch his hand, and was rewarded with a jolting electric shock of such magnitude that only with effort did he stop himself from stumbling back, out of the sigil’s focus.
Harley was so fixated on Randolph that he almost didn’t notice the portal opening up in front of them.
It was lit with a silver light, the same sort that had come over Randolph, but far brighter. The outer edges seemed to be— seemed to be spinning, sparking and whirling in a way Harley couldn’t quite wrap his head around. It started off as a pinprick, so luminous he could hardly look at it, and grew steadily until it was the size of a large wardrobe. Randolph didn’t open his eyes, didn’t stop chanting.
Inside it— inside it—
Harley had heard Randolph describe things as indescribable, unspeakable, before, and he had always to some degree laughed it off. Now, though, now— all he could say was that it was bright, and somehow geometric, and that he was completely convinced by the notion that if he looked at it long enough he could figure out how to square the circle, and everything else equally impossible.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
He jumped, turned and looked down to see Randolph, whose chanting had stopped without Harley noticing. He’d opened his eyes, and was looking up at Harley with an expression Harley had never seen before— not just on him, but on anyone. Though his eyes were their usual shade of bluish-gray, like the North Atlantic during an especially stormy November, there seemed to be something luminous behind them, backlighting them in a way Harley couldn’t explain.
“Y—yes.”
Randolph took a deep breath, and shuddered a little, and Harley was suddenly overcome with the fear that this…whatever-it-was filling him was too much for him, would shatter his body— human, and delicate even by human standards— into a million pieces, like a china doll exposed to burning heat.
“I’m all right, Harley,” murmured Randolph. “It’s nothing I haven’t done before.”
Harley looked back at the portal, trying to quell his worry, and saw—somehow, beyond the brightness, beyond that incomprehensible geometry, far off in the interstitial distance— a country road, lit by warm sunshine, with a sign sticking out of green grass that read (Harley squinted) ULTHAR 5 MI.
Harley reached out and took Randolph’s hand, suddenly no longer afraid. This time, there was no shock, and Randolph looked up at him with a brilliant smile that somehow had nothing supernatural about it at all.
“Are you ready?”
Harley looked out, at the strange space between here and there, and nodded. “Are you?”
“Never more.” Randolph squeezed his hand, and the signed contract fluttered to the ground, forgotten.
Thunder roared outside their house, on the dividing line between South Carolina and the Atlantic, and Harley closed his eyes as they stepped through as one.
randolph carter, harley warren, e?
E. Signing a document
“You’re sure you remembered everything?”
“Mm-hm.”“What about the belladonna, did you get—”
“Yep.”
“And the deadly nightshade?”
“Right here.”
“Tallow candles?”
“Yes, I got the candles, Randolph. Jesus. Are you sure you’re all right with this?”
You certainly don’t look all right, Harley added to himself. He could see Randolph trying to hide it, perched on the kitchen island and swinging his feet a few inches off the floor in a vain attempt at nonchalance, but he was deathly pale, and Harley could see the skin on his knuckles stretched to whiteness with how hard he was gripping the marble counter. He looked like he might faint. (Not that that was uncommon, with him.)
But Randolph shook his head, squared his shoulders in a gesture that would have conveyed resolve in someone more sturdy but on him seemed more indicative of a kind of endearing, fragile bravery, and pried his fingers away from the counter. “I’m fine. Just…nervous.”
“You and me both.” Harley turned away from him, went back to setting out the candles. Thunder boomed outside, and he could have sworn he felt the foundations of the house— their house, he had to keep reminding himself— shudder with it. The ground wasn’t exactly sturdy here, in their century-old bungalow at the edge of the brackish South Carolina coastal marshland, but it hadn’t betrayed them so far. The rain— not here yet, but impending, judging by the heaviness and metal tang of the air outside and the low-hanging clouds glowing faintly green in the humidity— was another story.
They’d already done the sigils, earlier that day, chalked them into the damp salty floorboards and left them to settle. Basic pentagram, then some Harley recognized, then some he didn’t. Normally that would have unsettled him, but this was…different, because in this he had no expertise at all, beyond a basic understanding of the theory behind interdimensionality. He wasn’t used to relying so fully on Randolph in these sorts of things, and part of him was leery about it. It was the same part that insisted that Harley be the one to drive them places and handle their business dealings and carry Randolph up the stairs to bed when he’d fallen asleep at his desk— that looked at his partner’s small frame and mild manner and questioned how reliable could he be, really, especially in a crisis?
That part of him was stupid, usually, and Harley generally tried to ignore it. Still, it felt…uncomfortable, to not know precisely what it was that he was doing. Everything he knew about the occult told him that should be setting off alarm bells.
“Are you all right with this?”
Harley jumped a little bit as he was jerked out of his reverie. “What?”
It came out a little brusque, snappish, and Randolph cringed in a way that made Harley wince. “Sorry. You startled me.”
“It’s all right.” Randolph looked away, out the window, at the gathering storm. “I just— you seem a little on edge.”
“Oh, I’m on edge?” Harley asked teasingly.
Randolph flushed a little. “Not saying that I’m not, but—”
Harley crossed the room in a brisk few strides, abandoning the groundwork he’d been laying, and took Randolph’s waist in his hands. “Hm?”
Randolph swatted at him half-heartedly. “Stop that. You’re distracting the both of us”
“What, me? Never.” Harley gave him a little squeeze, and Randolph yelped at a pitch and volume completely inordinate for the amount of pressure applied. Harley smiled a little, to himself, and didn’t let go.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Randolph told him, with the smallest hint of a whine in it.
“Which was?” Harley leaned in, just a bit, so that Randolph had to tilt his head back to keep eye contact. (It had astounded him since they first met how really insubstantial he was, considering the sheer amount of stubborn willpower he managed to pack into that little body. You would think such evident vulnerability would have left him with rather more common sense, but apparently not.)
“Are you okay with this?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Harley.” Randolph pushed his hands away from his waist, and Harley let him. “Really.”
“Yes.” Randolph frowned up at him, and Harley took his hands in his. “Yes, doll, I am fine with this. I’m a tad nervous, but I trust you to keep us safe, and—”
“And?”
Harley leaned down and kissed him, then, with the kind of firm gentleness that he knew from experience made Randolph melt. It wasn’t a long kiss, but it was enough, and when Harley pulled back he saw Randolph with his eyes closed, a faint, sweet smile on his face. It took him a few moments to come back to himself.
“And I’m excited,” Harley murmured, when he did. “Now, is there anything else I need to know?”
+++
It was almost surprising, how fast preparations went. Sometimes Harley’s nerves (rare as they were) made things slow down, spread like taffy; sometimes, like now, it made them speed by. Before he knew it he and Randolph were standing in the circle together, shoulder to shoulder, the conglomeration of chalk sigils spreading out in perfect symmetry around them. The thunder boomed louder outside, though the rain still hadn’t arrived, and even their enclosed living room was heavy with the lack of air pressure and the scent of sharp ozone.
Harley lit the candles, one by one, while Randolph took out the parchment from his coat pocket and read it over one more time.
When they were first planning this ritual, months ago, Randolph had come across the obscure idea of a contract in his reading. It had been at a library…over there, so Harley had had no access to it, but Randolph had explained it to him from his notes.
“It’s like—” he’d sought for words for a few moments, and Harley did his best to quell his irritation— “like insurance, almost. You make a sacrifice, to prove your good faith and subservience to them, and they promise not to harm you while you pass through their domain.”
“Domain?”
“Like—” Randolph had gestured, vaguely— “the interstitial space, between here and there, and also here and everywhere. It’s— how it is is that it’s like reflecting pools in a garden.”
Harley had frowned. “How so?”
“We live in one pool. Where I go at night, that’s another. To get from here to there, I, and we, and everyone else has to come up out of the pool where we start, and cross the in-between space, and then dive into the pool where we want to go. Except the thing is that we’re like fish, kind of— we’re not suited to survive out there, and we’re not suited to survive in some of the pools, either, because some are fire, and some are acid, and so on. So when we cross the garden, on dry land, we’re vulnerable. It hurts us, and it’s hard.”
“Wait, so— are you saying we might die, in the crossing?”
“Well, yes. We might. But we have things to help us. That’s what the sigils I showed you are for, and that’s what this contract is for, because the things out there that live in the garden like to prey on us when we pass through their domain, and this is where they promise that they won’t.”
“Couldn’t they just—” Harley had rubbed his temples— “just eat us, or whatever, anyway? If they’re so much more powerful, like you always say?”
“They could.” Randolph had finished the last of his drink, set the wine-glass delicately on the table. “But that would ruin the fun, I think. They tend to enjoy the chase more than anything. Or so they tell me.”
Harley had shivered, then, even in the warm and civilized interior of Charleston’s nicest steakhouse. It had taken him until the end of their meal, when he was holding the door for Randolph on the way to the car, when he realized—
“Don’t you travel without a contract, then, every time you dream? What keeps them from getting you?”
Randolph had glanced up at him, then, with the daring glint in his eye that always made Harley worry. “I’m very fast.”
Harley shivered again, now, standing at the focus of the spiralling sigil. The contract in Randolph’s hands, every word chosen with neurosurgical care, suddenly looked very much like a fragile, meaningless piece of crumbling parchment.
He kicked himself for the sentiment. Thoughts matter here, Randolph had told him, more than anything else. The boundary between worlds is a pliable place, where the rules of our particular reality don’t apply in the same way. Thinking something might make it so.
Randolph drew his knife from the sheath at his waist, and handed it to Harley. “You do it. If I look, I’ll faint.”
One quick cut across the crook of Randolph’s elbow, one across the crook of his own. With Randolph still looking away, eyes squeezed tightly shut, Harley held the contract below both of their outstretched forearms, and let the blood drip down.
“Is it over?” Randolph’s voice sounded worryingly faint.
“Not yet.” Harley quickly bandaged Randolph’s arm, then his own, one-handed. “Now it is.”
“Good grief.” Randolph blew out a breath, squared his shoulders. “Contract?”
“Right here.” Harley handed it to him, and he took it with a surprisingly steady grasp.
“All right.” Randolph looked up at him. “Are you ready?”
Harley nodded, trying to conceal the pounding of his heart with a stiff upper lip. “Think so.”
Thunder crashed outside, lightning crackled across the luminous sky, and Randolph began to chant.
At first it was Latin, which Harley knew— something about a void, vacuum vacuorum, interstitium spatium orbium, terra siderium et deum— then Greek, which he wasn’t so familiar with, then— something that might have been Hebrew, or Aramaic, then— Egyptian?— then—
He didn’t recognize the language after that, and he didn’t think Randolph did either. Something had come over him. His hair, loose reddish-blond curls, wasn’t standing on end from electricity (which would have at least been understandable, considering the storm), but floating, as if he were in free fall, or zero gravity. There was— and it might have been the light from outside, but somehow Harley doubted it— a faint glow to his skin, something silvery and strange. Gingerly, Harley reached out to touch his hand, and was rewarded with a jolting electric shock of such magnitude that only with effort did he stop himself from stumbling back, out of the sigil’s focus.
Harley was so fixated on Randolph that he almost didn’t notice the portal opening up in front of them.
It was lit with a silver light, the same sort that had come over Randolph, but far brighter. The outer edges seemed to be— seemed to be spinning, sparking and whirling in a way Harley couldn’t quite wrap his head around. It started off as a pinprick, so luminous he could hardly look at it, and grew steadily until it was the size of a large wardrobe. Randolph didn’t open his eyes, didn’t stop chanting.
Inside it— inside it—
Harley had heard Randolph describe things as indescribable, unspeakable, before, and he had always to some degree laughed it off. Now, though, now— all he could say was that it was bright, and somehow geometric, and that he was completely convinced by the notion that if he looked at it long enough he could figure out how to square the circle, and everything else equally impossible.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
He jumped, turned and looked down to see Randolph, whose chanting had stopped without Harley noticing. He’d opened his eyes, and was looking up at Harley with an expression Harley had never seen before— not just on him, but on anyone. Though his eyes were their usual shade of bluish-gray, like the North Atlantic during an especially stormy November, there seemed to be something luminous behind them, backlighting them in a way Harley couldn’t explain.
“Y—yes.”
Randolph took a deep breath, and shuddered a little, and Harley was suddenly overcome with the fear that this…whatever-it-was filling him was too much for him, would shatter his body— human, and delicate even by human standards— into a million pieces, like a china doll exposed to burning heat.
“I’m all right, Harley,” murmured Randolph. “It’s nothing I haven’t done before.”
Harley looked back at the portal, trying to quell his worry, and saw—somehow, beyond the brightness, beyond that incomprehensible geometry, far off in the interstitial distance— a country road, lit by warm sunshine, with a sign sticking out of green grass that read (Harley squinted) ULTHAR 5 MI.
Harley reached out and took Randolph’s hand, suddenly no longer afraid. This time, there was no shock, and Randolph looked up at him with a brilliant smile that somehow had nothing supernatural about it at all.
“Are you ready?”
Harley looked out, at the strange space between here and there, and nodded. “Are you?”
“Never more.” Randolph squeezed his hand, and the signed contract fluttered to the ground, forgotten.
Thunder roared outside their house, on the dividing line between South Carolina and the Atlantic, and Harley closed his eyes as they stepped through as one.
