#hawkwords

ii.

Even before He knew; Even before He thought; Even before He acknowledged.

There were:

Brothers. At the beginning of Time.

Death; and Silence (Or Kings of Hell and Hope, whichever you prefer.) 

And a third. Jealous; Spiteful; Proud. Who walked a Path once treaded by Another.  Who talked through tongues once spoken by a Hawk.

But one:

Must never trust his secrets to a Bird of Prey; (For such a fragile little raptor this one was.)

A Widow's bite he longed to kiss, But arachnids are and always will be sly, And from a broken mind the bird was burned Into a sleep

So deep

It was forever quiet. 

iii.

Savior disguised as Martyr disguised as Alchemist of New (A Magician of Old) took then the broken little spider From her den;

(The Itsy Bitsy Spider crawled so deep; she didn't know Where else to look: And in cigarettes and Forgotten Hopes She thought she could find respire-- and shattered girls for guilt will also sometimes do that.)

But really; can you blame the split girl; If she longed For integrity - for truth?

So a Whisperer who knew to lie; And spun this art so very well: He grabbed the girl, caught her by the lip.

A bargain: Truth, and an eternity in Hell. 

She broke herself, of Fate She was a child.

In Synchronicity she bled.

iv.

Once found again; and once lost; Split even more; she pulled herself

Apart.

A trickster known for tinkering With Fate  Searched for emptiness he knew he thought deserved.

Pity was what was fed to him instead.

(A Hawk's broken wings are hard enough to mend.) 

An angel spoken of before; Whom already had found himself teetering;

(Inches from the brink)

He asked about the human inside, hidden, still And received an answer Far much worse

Than Death.

And in their pain she found the clarity She longed for. 

v.

But where one found herself; Another one was lost.

And so Magician took it up and flew (And guilt once again played such. A major. Part.) 

Little fly was soon caught; And grasped so tight.

"He's not a man. He's a spider at the center of a web."

From widow to another aranea still: But this one dabbled More in madness

Than in guilt (for madness only truly thinks it's sane).

And then; Pride (known master; unspoken Hellhound) slyly slipped into his bones too Whispered in twisted tongues

Shattered tattered suits of Westwood. 

Giants burned; and nighttime stars aflame.

They shook.

vi.

Four brothers hide within London's burning heart; None in blood are kept together.

But in bond.

A Hunter and a Trickster and two angels, Lost Kings and Lords and future Rulers of the Light.

So of them;

The Dark Winged rider of the Horse; He dared to taste what secrets A Doe girl had to mend.

(And oh, was she the sweetest of them all);

But she was the curse that brought forth wrath For a brother wrongfully believed: Whispered Lies Of Betrayal, and Lust, and Need.

And this sealed yet the Fall commencing: (A bow presented to once friendly hands).

So of them;

The quiet one who Knew; spilled kin blood Of a rotten kind. And cleared a mind

Of nightmares galloping.

So of them;

The Horns in Darkness took it upon himself; To hunt he who sought to burn

(And both of those were Fallen ones of a different sort; Muse and Armalach and fools).

The Doe To ash.

vii.

And so, in quietness, and summer storms and winter Rains Was war declared, upon Earth's ragged gasps.

For a Lost Key was yet to find its place; And Hell was yet to burn; And blood yet to be spilled.

And all of those who saw the gathered storm Knew times were there to change

And change to last.

viii.

In the beginning: War.

(Or so they say.)

In the beginning: Broken hearts.

(Or so they say.)

In the beginning: Hope.

He shuts his eyes as his breath is caught in his caved in throat and suffocates in throbbing blood that wets his shattered ribs, arms sprawled bent at angles that jab through his skin. Marrow shines on the asphalt.

Blood sticks to hair which burning skin has melted into. Scar tissue and scabs, a single eye rotating madly searching for the comfort of an eyelid that is no more. The socket rattles as its emptiness becomes eternal.

The fragility of a vessel that has crumbled in his hands.

He can feel fresh air against his burning guts, the hole in his stomach and the muscles pumping and everything going to waste.

A single feather twitches: darkness fills his eyes for a second until stars blossom in front of them once more. The Betrayer looks at the Heavens and feels teeth resting on his tongue and in his mouth: broken, shattered; gums rotting and bleeding, empty.

He starts laughing, a gargled horrid sound that feels much more like a dying beast's scream than an expression of joy. 

Or exasperation.

Or madness.

He laughs, Furor kissing the split wound that once used to be a mouth. He laughs until something comes loose inside of him: a bone, what's left of his sanity, his heart.

And after the sound has died down and the empty street stops echoing with it, he breathes some more and basks in the pain: the sound of wind slipping out of every shattered inch of skin as already crippled lungs desperately try to hold onto it.

The bones slowly melt back into place. Those are the fist thing he must think of, necessary and vital for movement.

He turns to his side, then. Slowly. Moaning with every movement. 

He manages to pull his shivering body up from the floor, curled up with his aching forehead against the street wet with his own blood. Wet with Clint Barton's blood.

He grabs onto a dumpster then, forces himself to stand. And new blood flows. Teeth rattle. He needs to lean over for a second as the wings rub against the asphalt. Raw and bloodied.

But the feathers will be first. The feathers: his pride, his joy, his status quo.

He searches deep inside of him for a Presence now warped, reduced to something so much more different than it is meant to be.

But it works, as he feels the plumage curl under the Power, and as he feels the cells regenerate and be reborn.

He moans loudly, once he's done: both pleasure and relief and pain leaving his body, the emptiness behind it.

He wipes the spit from his chin with his sleeve and runs hesitant fingers along his face: the charred burnt skin curls under his fingertips, ribbons of flesh that peel off with such ease he's tempted to start laughing again. But he needs to clear his mind.

His energies are already dangerously low. 

Hands run to find his stomach, the deep gash, the intestines spilling. He furrows his brow and concentrates. And once again, he feels the Essence, and the flesh rebuilt.

Once again, the pleasure, the relief, the emptiness.

And now, the last bit: his face, the teeth, the charred remnants of his tongue. He is reborn, once again.

Clint Barton's burning eyes find their muscles and blood vessels and skin again. The eyelids close over them once, twice, and then he opens them.

He breathes through lungs that have their shape again, feels ribs flex, no longer broken, no longer dying.

He smirks, he swallows, he feels energy crackle through his blood. He glares towards the now shattered window, tricks himself into seeing stag eyes staring down at him.

Raphael starts walking down the street, ignoring the slight limp in his right leg.

"Well, the priest's left an hour ago."

He isn't used to the sound of his voice. Not anymore. Not ever since Pain, because Pain is sacred and Pain deserves silence.

"Didn't even say your name right. Rich, Richard Brook. I guess that's why you never got my letters, right? Jesus. Jesus."

He covers his face with his hands and can almost hear Jim laughing at him from below.

"Who the fuck am I kidding. You didn't want to be found. By your past, which was me. By the government. By whoever was fucking chasing you around. They say you were a paid actor, something like that. That this--this detective, Sherlock Holmes? Was paying you to pretend. Which is bull."

He lights a cigarette, an automatism that he doesn't even notice anymore.

"Shit. I saw the real Jim, I saw him and I felt him and I saw you lie and sneak around and fuck with me and fuck me. And you were a trickster in disguise, Hellsent. Falling in love with anyone and anything and destroying it because you were incapable of love. You were an addict, Jim."

His name feels like a curse, sly between his teeth.

"And I was nothing but another fucking drug to try out, wasn't I?"

Has he just screamed?

"You piece of shit. You pathetic--oh, to Hell with it. Why am I even getting mad? Why should I even care when you didn't? I'm the only one here, Jim. The only person who took his time to come, and I'm from fucking Los Angeles. And you're dead."

He stares at the tombstone with the wrong name and wants to gag because it's the wrong name, Christ, such a detail and his entire identity is gone.

But that's what he wanted.

"You're dead. And that's what you told me, when you left, 'I'm dead to you, John.' - a mock Irish accents rolls off his tongue and feels heavier spoken than thought - and I tried so fucking hard to get rid of your smell from my sheets and it didn't work. You. You were. God, you fucked it all up. Balth, the demon who wanted me dead, and you fell...grew addicted to him faster than it took you to fall in love with me, I guess, although you said you deserved to be dead and cried. But he was a God (your God) and I was a lowly mortal. And it doesn't even have to do with that shitface, you know? Because I was jealous, and it doesn't just have to do with that, either. Because you left-"

He realizes now that he's crying. Not too loud, not too wet. But crying.

"You left me and danced with powers so much bigger than you ever were, a tiny bored man. A tiny, bored, man. And I wasn't enough, was I? And you were the first good thing ever since Emma. Ever since Nat but Nat had other me back then and guilt because of that fucking Hawk and Archangel and once we realized what we could've been it was too late. For both of us. So you were the only thing."

He runs a hand through his hair and crouches in front of the grave, stares the double Os of Brook straight in the eye and his voice quivers just a little and his lips taste salty.

Just a little.

"You. Jesus. You. You puzzle. I."

He gasps for air and lets his body fall so he's on his knees, forehead resting against the stone. It scrapes his skin, he hopes it'll bleed. 

One last kiss.

"I love you."

It tastes more like dream than actual words. And maybe he just imagined himself saying it, chasm where his heart should be.

"I love you."

Pitter patter pitter patter and pit pit pit.

It's raining, hair stuck to his forehead. But it doesn't matter.

John had known all of this, until he had found that his body fit inside Jim's in ways that meant elbows aligned perfectly and knees fit within one another without a sound and so all of the above and all the darkness had not mattered.

Not even the darkness Jim had brought on by himself: even that had become over the years both balm and poison and red-hot black blood flowing from one vein to the next feeding a body ever-hungry for oxygen. An idyllic notion of what love was or thought it could've been and this was new and beautiful, and it felt like Emma all over again.

Ownership was just another way of putting it.

But there wasn't any blood flowing, not anymore, and embers that were once a roaring flame were now turning cold. 

He stops and realizes he has been staring at nothingness and it has been five minutes that feel like ten years that feel like a lifetime, and he can't even see her and if he were sane he'd start screaming at her and maybe hate her for telling him but he isn't so all the pain will become his and his alone and bite away at rotten innards and maybe, hopefully, kill him.

Natasha doesn't even ask to sit down and she doesn't mind because she's done it all before. Although she shouldn't even be there although the DGI is no more and had been buried and kept locked away and all files that were burnable had been incinerated and all data erased, forever, and no word of bodies with wings and demons with porcelaine skin and Hells with no rulers was to ever be mentioned again, she is there because she knows she needs to be.

She stands in the doorway of this house he crawled back to when Jim went to dance with Sherlock along razorblades and realized his mind was nothing but a puzzle and a box of bored cats and yet he loved him relentlessly and thoroughly through it all over and over and over. Even when letters had no answers and calls weren't returned he dug his nails into poor little ghost-Jim without knowing that all Jim was was scared of breaking something so precious as his Exorcist. Breaking him for good after Balthazar and Ellie and bullet wounds and teeth marks.

But John never knew this, did he? And now Romanoff who looks a little older than five years before has shown up without an umbrella knocking on his door, and that was when he realized all was gone forever.

Because Natasha Romanoff had always come in through the window.

And that was when he realized she brought nothing but pain that was maybe nothing but more pain.

And Jim, my God, little dancer Jim, little sly Jim, mad Jim, pretty Jim, painful arrogant narcissistic Jim had danced and had tripped and fallen, fallen, fallen into the arms of fairy tales and games with smart detectives. Fallen into the kiss of a sweet bullet that was sweeter than John's lips that tasted of nicotine and damnation. Thrill stronger than any nails scraping along skin, bliss deeper than any pleasure-fueled scream.

He was dead and John is curled up on a floor and his best friend stares at him and there's crystal-clear pain biting on her tongue.

He thinks he hears her say "I'm sorry." but for now all he hears is his brain on the verge of splitting.

Splitting.

Splitting.

Maybe if it broke he would be free.

And he is the only one there, crushed under the confirmation that Jim is gone as easily as he had come and stumbled into his life and turned it upside down, and he is gone and the word gone tastes of stale whiskey and smells of unburied coffins.

* 

It's raining, in this tiny anonymous British churchyard.

It's raining.