For someone once called the 'The Deathless Merchant of London', Percival Darke sure can die.
Content Warning: Depictions of gore/injury, and mentions of cannibalism.
A Murder and Relief in the Dark by xexnoncores
A Murder and Relief in the Dark | ACT 1 - Pierce the Velvet »
January 10th, 1998
There is nothing hotter than indignation, than raw, furied humiliation impaled on a sword.
Percival Darke sucks in air through his teeth, gasping, choking, sputtering. All of it is iron, red-hot and screaming, and so it cleaves through his fangs with little remorse as his hand tremors towards his pager. Before collapsing again, he coughs up blood and straddles his legs to keep his head above the dirty floor, barely managing to press that little white button on the side.
It is cold, the first time in over a century he has been made aware of such a concept.
Scarlet soaks his wet eyeballs for a second, flooding them as blood continues to spill from his head with little restraint. To quell his boiling heart and the white-hot indignation he is fighting against, he spits it out on top of her, across her mangled cheek he had already lashed. On top of this dog, this disrespectful mongrel that managed to shove a blade into his chest and put a bullet into his spine. A machete, too—the nerve of her to use such a brutish weapon—but she missed the aorta by a few centimeters. A few crucial, precious centimeters.
He will have to dismember her later, deign her to hell by consuming her and denying whatever burial the prayer beads on her neck were pious for. For now though, he is content with the heavy footsteps tumbling down the stairwell, the sound of relief hopefully enveloping him soon.
Several voices shriek. His five bodyguards, all two decades loyal.
“Oh my god—!”
“Who let this happen?!”
“Sir Darke, can you stand—?!”
Their voices quickly cacophonize. He hisses as two reach for his arms.
“Shut up—!”
The tallest, Cecil, lifts him to his feet as he hacks out more red, wincing. Percival’s legs are completely limp, dangling like a cut ragdoll. The dead agent was a wonderful shot—she put a bullet straight in his third lumbar nerve.
“Ready the helicopter,” Cecil barks over a pulled out walkie-talkie. “Now!”
Percival groans as he’s hoisted up and flipped, slung over broad shoulders in what was actually not that painful of a support position. But god, was he a child? A pillaged maiden? A sack of potatoes?
“G-Gah—you insolent little—!”
He wants to curse, but all that whites his mind is a ripping pain. His nails dig into Cecil instead, all the way through kevlar plating.
“Charles! Alton! Come with me!” he says, showing no flinching himself. “Radio Sir Amos of the situation while I check with Addison on Iris!”
Iris, Percival thinks. It’s the most lucid thought he’s had since being downed.
Oh no, the agent’s target was supposed to be her as well. Knowing these kinds of ants, they always came in pairs. Where was she? Was she safe?
“Find…Find…”
He hacks out more blood. There’s no limit on what his body can give when wounded—that was the unfortunate downside of being nearly perfectly invulnerable. His flesh was going to give and give until it healed, until it was stitching up spasming and raw.
Biting his lip as Cecil quickly ferries him up the stairs, he has to constrain himself from barking orders. He has to restrain his own mind from wandering pointlessly towards macabre ends and against the godly pedestal he placed his importance upon. Charles and Alton follow behind wordlessly while the other two begin undressing the offending body, flinging aside all matter of decorum or grace its god may have bequeathed it with. There was no time for Percival to admit how delightfully lacking it was in rigor mortis.
“Iris—” he manages to sputter.
“Addison, do you have copy on Iris’s location?” Cecil asks.
It’s a suffocating few seconds until the walkie-talkie static clears.
“Affirmative,” her voice rings out. “She’s being ferried up towards the helipad by Althea from the eleventh floor.
“Good,” Cecil affirms. “Have her prep the opioid and medical kits once she reaches her destination, and ready the ketamine patches for immediate use.”
There’s no room for a sigh of relief, but Percival takes it anyway. As he takes that overextension, his stomach collapses against the weight of a torn diaphragm. A cascade of phlegm quickly pours from his mouth, draining from his throat and sliding down his chin.
No god to thank for such luck except that of Fate for this. And even that is a slaughterhouse position.
His expression sticks haphazardly to his face as he’s thrust into sickly yellow light. It snaps as soon as he’s jostled around further by the twists and turns of rosy corridors, incandescence blotting out all sense of humor and manners. Had he been in any other situation not tinged by screeching nerve endings, he would have lamented how shoddy of a place this was to perform such a high-profile execution. This hotel was old, unfashionably behind the times in both decor and staff uniforms—it was chosen purely because of Amos’s nostalgia for its (admittedly wonderful) facilities, and nothing more.
At least have some style if you were sending someone to their grave, hm? He was supposed to be in London next week anyway. Couldn’t they have done this there?
The home advantage would have probably have not even gotten them through the front door though…
Hopefully these accommodations will not make too much of a terrible impression on Iris. This was her first business trip with him, the first time she was exposed to the sights of what her life was going to be like as his heir. How was she supposed to understand what she was deserving of in substandard lodgings like this? With paintings so disgusting rococo they practically bled chalk, and polyester carpets woven deceitfully to mimic cotton? Where was the Western European flare, the Napoleonic influences this great city built its foundation on?!
24/7 staff service was never enough to save tacky history and gaudy luxuriousness, even if their airhead customers swallowed it like pigs.
“Cecil,” Addison rings out. “Iris has been loaded into the helicopter. We’re waiting on Sir Percival’s arrival. Amos has confirmed that hired security are scouting the building and will levy deadly force against suspicious individuals.”
“And the auction?” he asks.
“The auction will continue unimpeded,” she responds.
“Perfect. We’re almost there,” Cecil grunts into his radio.
Percival balls his hands up into a fist. Augh, the warm wetness falling down his face was forcing him pallid. And his stomach so flat against Cecil’s jutting shoulder—
“You imbecile—”
A little bit of vomit burns his throat.
“Excuse me? Sir?”
“Put me—put me—”
Can’t breathe. The hydrochloric acid bubbles and sears down his windpipe. Percival gasps, shaking like a foal trying to hoist himself up towards uprightness. Alton and Charles hover around his face, too close for comfort in dizzying, nauseating fashion. Their black suits glut themselves too widely on his blurring vision.
“Back up!” he rasps at them, swiping before craning nervously back to Cecil. His lips shake as he motions frantically to a nearby chair, waving his arms like a chicken with its head cut off. Abasement burns as the standing three stare at each other for a second too long until the pressure ruptures and Percival heaves.
“Cecil!” Alton yells.
“Put him down, put him down!” Charles follows up. “For fuck’s sake—!”
“Ah—sir I’m sorry!” Cecil apologizes quickly, hurriedly slinging him off his back and into a little wooden chair. The smell of half-digested roast duck and foie gras stains the air with fatty intentions, sloughing lipids and rotting malfeasance. Percival vomits again, tears staining his eyes from the heat flooding his face, his pride breaking with every passing second.
“Do we need to bring the medical kit down here now?” Alton asks.
“That might be a good idea,” Charles says.
“We’re too close to the helicopter though,” Cecil replies. “We don’t know if there’s a danger still—”
“Do we look like idiots?” Alton quips. He points his finger in Cecil’s face as Percival groans.
“N-No,” Cecil stutters. “But we need to prioritize Sir Percival’s safety!”
“We do, but we also need to make sure he doesn’t drown in his own bodily fluids. That’ll be easier to do when he’s not so overtaken with pain.”
“Are you—Are you sure…?”
Both Charles and Alton nod as Percival grits his teeth. His head spins, the entire room shifting axises. Vertical, horizontal, downwards, backwards—gravity was warbling the ground and grinding concrete into his ears.
“Silence…!” he shrieks at them, his voice cavalcading higher than expected.
All three of them freeze. Pure terror carves into their faces, even behind their impossibly black shades. Their pupils shrink to pinpoint needles, anticipation folding over into paranoia, of what kind Percival does not care.
He huffs, his head wobbling back and forth before he forces steady eye contact with them. His normally white face has been completely engulfed in blood and bruises.
“…I need…just two things, you hear me?” he sibilants. All three stand to attention as he lumbers another breath, instinctively wishing he had a liter of morphine on him now.
“…I need you…to clean me up…and I need…to be out of here, quickly. Follow my orders exactly, without all this…idle chatter.”
“Cleaned up?” Cecil asks, balking.
Percival glares at him, both Alton and Charles following suit. The pair take out white handkerchiefs while Cecil’s face burns, watching them mop up blood off once smooth skin and yellow stains off starched cotton. It’s unnerving to everyone how dark and veined the bruising is, but Charles quickly throws down Percival’s hair to cover it up.
A broken vase being hidden away from onlookers, how deflatingly unglamorous. Percival supposes to himself that he is lucky that his hair has grown out enough to offer him such a luxury, but his ego spars with a sense of worry when Iris pops into his head again. What would she think?
What would she do seeing her high-held father so close to death? So disheveled, stinking of cadavers, so stained by human intentions?
Their blood was precious, irreplaceable. His first promise as he dragged her out of that ring of corpses torn apart as part of her inheritance ritual was that she would know only the spilled ichor of others, that she would not witness death’s hand until her contracted time came. Feburary 14th, 1996—this was the day the world shook as its future heir was brought unto its undeserving flesh. Dragged out of an iron case, transfixed from burning coals, a body came out so small and with eyes bluer than any jewel or sky, destined to swallow it all.
And it was good, in all ways one could describe such a miracle.
She didn’t sound like she was hurt—but a part of Percival still felt like he had failed on that promise somewhere. That he was getting ready to fail Iris on the path her mind was supposed to take. Would she succeed if she thought of herself as any less than invincible? Anxiety was a disease that was for the masses beneath them—it was not a vice that he would entertain. And yet here he was, at the edge of life and death so—! So—!
“Sir, we should get going,” Charles says plainly, leaning up. “A G.O.C signal sent to the body downstairs was just decrypted, requesting mission status. It seems like they’ve set up reconnaissance a few blocks down.”
Percival holds out his arms to be lifted up once again, this time more gracefully. “Eliminate them at once…and have their lower halves loaded into my larder after they are dealt with. I want those bastards to know this…sting of theirs failed.”
Alton and Charles nod, Cecil biting his nails as Percival refuses to meet his gaze. The carrying pair snicker as they resume the route, Cecil falling behind.
“Sir—” he clamors.
Percival says nothing.
The carrying pair shoot him a look telling him to shut up until he catches up with them, his posture straight and tall.
“…Can I suggest that you save the hands of the woman downstairs, and any others we catch tonight? I recall that Miss Iris, uh, likes gnawing on the phalanxes of…”
He trails off with a loosening pace. Percival narrows his eyes at him, but eventually smiles.
“Wonderful idea Cecil,” he says with a sound that could be akin to a purr. “That slipped my mind in all of this chaos.”
“I’ll radio Temperance and Diana to—”
“We’re almost there,” Percival quips. “Do it…once I’m gone.”
It’s then when two massive doors swing open to reveal the starless night sky. Black helicopter blades roar, shearing heavy quakes into the ground and ears. Each rotation chops the senses, beckoning the city to bend to its knee.
“Sir!” Althea yells. She points to Iris buckled in the helicopter seat.
Percival beams, trying not to make any sudden movements. His heart swells, and he taps the pair carrying him to hurry. They oblige without hesitation while Cecil begins conversing with Althea.
“Steady—” Charles starts.
“Keep his thighs still,” Alton says. “Don’t let them move too far right.”
“Got it—oh, I see the med kit! I’ll get to that—”
Percival grunts as he’s shuffled in less gracefully than intended, but there’s no complaint as Charles unpeels three black patches from clear plastic and lifts his suit up.
“Where?” he asks.
“Both sides of my hips, and one on my chest.”
“None on your legs?”
Percival shakes his head. “Those are already recovering some of their sensation, and very little of it is pain.”
“…Are you sure?”
Both Charles and Alton look to Iris, who has been reaching for Percival this entire time with wide eyes. She babbles various half-words meaning “daddy”, and “father”, wholly unbothered by the noise or even any of the commotion that’s gone on.
Percival snaps his fingers to have her unbuckled from her booster seat and placed in his lap. Charles winces, but once he applies the patches, he obeys.
“Safe travels, sir,” he says as he backs up away from the helicopter. He turns around as Althea shouts something to him. “Sir Amos has confirmed he will meet you at Hotel Monteleone once the events here are concluded.”
“Wonderful…” he mutters with a heavy, relieved sigh. He clutches Iris close with an steel grip as painkillers flood his skin and bloodstream, numbing his brain from sharp needles to blots of gray.
The door slams quickly, and all is muffled. The helicopter initiates liftoff, its faceless pilot flicking buttons and levers that shine behind a black nylon net.
Iris whines and reaches for them, her little fingers wiggling like a freshly hatched bird. Percival laughs, holding her back.
“No, no…” he coos. “You have to stay on…Daddy’s lap, you know?”
“Why?” she asks. She squirms a little bit, trying again until he puts a hand on her head and rubs gently, back and forth. He’s intentional about angling his claws away from her baby-soft skin, away from her slicked hair and little ponytail.
“Because…you could get hurt,” he whispers, as if she was the only one in the world who didn’t deserve to know such a lack of safety nets existed. “Daddy doesn’t want you to fall.”
“Why? Does falling hurts?”
There she goes again. Percival knows what’s about to happen now—this always happened when she was told she wasn’t allowed to do something. Though he wants to throw caution to the wind, just for her, so that she’s not denied anything her little heart desires, he can’t do that tonight. He can’t. It’s unwise.
Chuckling, he wraps a thickly veined hand around her torso and snuggles her into his suit.
“Yes, falling can hurt. Remember that time you fell down the mansion stairs? When you were trying to find my library? You split your head open and cried so much!”
The image doesn’t soothe him as much as he thought it would. Though in hindsight, it was rather adorable how far of a tumble she took from walking up just five big steps, the sword pierces his mind and ruins everything. That glowing machete which plunged directly into his heart—the idea of it turning on and ripping Iris’s delicate body to shreds pulses bile into his throat. The mere idea she would look at that woman with a wide smile, and a warm expectation, wanting the kindness from her that was typical of the clientele they entertained, only to be met with betrayal her little mind wouldn’t even be able to comprehend…
Percival’s heart thumps. He clutches Iris closer, just a little bit too tightly for her. She flails, keening, but he doesn’t hear. His head flares up with the bloodiest worst case scenarios, each a different flavor of dismemberment and grief until she—
“…Ow!”
Iris burbles as her teeth sink in. Hard. Percival jolts to attention, slit pupils dilating and muscles tensing until Iris removes her mouth, unsatisfied.
“Hey!!” he exclaims, raising his voice, but only a little bit. “What did I say about biting?”
She turns her face away, puffing her cheeks. Percival takes her chin into his hand and pulls her head to meet his gaze.
“Iris…“
She stares at him for a second before biting him again. Her fangs travel deep this time, all the way through his thick layers of fabric. Her saliva soaks thoroughly, and she grinds enamel as if gnawing on bone until he taps her on the forehead, trying not to wail. He doesn’t need more pain right now!
“Iris!” Percival barks, forcing it through his teeth to avoid being too loud. “Do…Do not bite your father! Do you understand me?”
She hisses, opening up her mouth wide. Percival shivers as she dives down again but she smacks into his open palm instead, cold whites threatening to cut once more.
The two stare off at each other while Percival pushes his hand uncomfortably close into her gums. Her mouth is hot, runic magic inside flaring like burst knars.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, he thinks, as he has to struggle to push her back. His muscles begin screaming again, flaring up with choked lactic acid. Biting all the way into his bottom lip with tears pricking his eyes, he finally finds the strength and resolve to fully shove her until right at the climax of the action—
“Hungry!” she pipes at him. “Hungry!”
She yells twice as if he didn’t hear, as if her intention was to never let go, as if she was born from an orectic demon. Percival blinks, stunned to silence, a thick stream of red trickling down his chin.
“…Daddy ate!” she continues, staring at that stream of carnelian. Percival smiles, knowing to give her the floor and admiring how cute she was when she demanded to get her way. “I want some too! I want some now! Blood! Hands! Tongues!!!”
Without another word, she grabs his suit, but this time, he’s quick enough to clap his hands over her eyes like a cat.
“You little…”
His smile betrays a conversed insinuation in his heart, an invisible hoarseness putting down its sword to march towards satiation. Towards a complete leveling of everything built up over the past five hours, from chase, to stake, to rising action, to fall.
It all sublimates as titanium blades swing above their heads.
“…You’re right,” he replies with bated breath. “I did promise you we’d have one of our special dinners tonight. Was that why you weren’t eating any of the hors d'oeuvres?”
A kiss on the forehead—an exchange of not just affection, but the highest deification. The world was watching what the appropriate action to its future potentate was to be—Iris Darke should never go without what she wants.
She nods, and pouts with her black tongue sticking out. Percival can’t help but to burst into a full-bellied laughter, his baritone voice swirling perfectly with the ambient muffledness of the padded passenger hold.
“Hahaha! Oh, Iris, my deepest, most sincere of apologies. Your father didn’t mean to deprive you of a rich meal, something just…came up. Can you forgive me, O precious daughter? Please?”
There’s no time for a word, because he pulls Iris in closer before she can comprehend what’s going on. Night was the perfect opportunity for smothering truths, for hiding that which would shame and defile the flesh in the light. She wriggles just a bit, but his deep, labored breathing imparts a sense of dampening into her soul she would only understand as vague reminiscences when she was older.
“…Hungry,” is all she says as their hearts beat together in slow, henotic lulls. She digs her hands into his clothes, savoring the way he towered over and enveloped her totally.
“We’ll get something to eat soon,” he says again, defeated but relieved. “I’m sorry.”
Percival shudders a breath, grounding violent thoughts with the reality of her barely surviving weight. G.O.C agents had no restraints on themselves—they had no restraints for children, no restraint for war, no restraint on recalcitrance. The machete those hands held was ravenous, avaricious for carnality, blasphemous in its invisible tongues.
Would she have allowed Iris a recognizable corpse? Their paranoia of Sarkic rites ran deeper than its various gods which slept within the earth. Percival feared little, but even he was disgusted by the wanton cruelty a human-powered war machine could have towards the anomalous.
Iris pops her head out of his arms to gaze out of the helicopter window. He catches himself in time to witness the city lights reflecting in her eyes, a sea of man-made stars swimming like diamonds.
“…What do you see, Iris?”
His voice softens, for the both of them. Slowly, she puts a hand to the cold glass, enraptured. Condensation follows her warmth, smearing yellow pinpoints hazily. Her tiny fingerprints smudge like clouds of sticky mist, barely visible in the dark.
She says nothing, her other arm tethered into him. Without a word, his gaze follows her. It’s a smooth road to a plateau of normality, of what the axis of the earth is supposed to rotate around.
“…You like the pretty lights?”
“Yeth,” she says, in her usual high-pitched toddler voice. It means all the more now in the face of imminent loss.
“Do you want something like this when you grow up? A big city with as many lights as your heart desires?”
Silence. Iris simply stares, turning her head towards a tall building as the helicopter curves right. It juts out of the cubic landscape like a carved needle, reflective at all the right angles, asphalt halogens glittering, falling, and twinkling. The dark sky blurs splotched blue veins of light all over her face, shimmering like the surface of water.
They’re almost to the landing pad.
There’s nothing out there on the cloudless horizon, but it doesn't matter. No stars, no pinpoint Venus, no barely visible Mars. Nothing.
If she wants a city to replace them, Percival will give it to her. If she wants to drag astral bodies down and show them the miraculous power of her will, he’ll find a way to make them blush in shame. He’ll find a way to make them cry, beg, kneel, and writhe for her, mumbling helpless apologies for daring to think they could outshine her ambitions.
“I will never deny you anything, O heir of mine. A town, a parish, a country, a continent—you were born into this world to inherit it, and thus it shall all be given to you in time.”
That’s for his sake, not hers. Although he means it, they’re words meant to salve his heart as his hands clutch her clothes and body. He needs to be reminded she’s here, he needs to be reminded she wasn’t scarred by this, he needs to be reminded the veil of the world’s cruelty hasn’t been draped over her yet.
He needs to remind himself she isn’t scared. She is to be the one to wield the whip, not the other way around.
What good parent doesn’t want their child to suffer?
She looks up at him as they land, as anxious bodies crawl over the concrete with their mortal feet and mouths. As black sunglasses mash every face into monochrome monotony, the same significance as each other, of low significance to them.
Percival doesn’t even realize the pain medication is wearing off as the door swings open and he’s asked too many questions.
Everything will be okay as long as she is alive.
And they are both alive because of…
A Murder and Relief in the Dark | ACT 1 - Pierce the Velvet »