Beyond the Pale

by vargrimar

While Jamison never imagined he'd like the taste of steel in his mouth, he certainly doesn't mind it in hers. The Bloodborne AU absolutely no one asked for.

Dawn is shrouded by the enveloping grey of thick thunderheads.

The Cathedral Ward's streets are wet, winding mosaics of old cobblestones slick from the crescendoing storm. Rain hammers down from the rooftops and pours between the grooves of worn stonework, fleeing into spaces of rocky soil. Webs of lightning splinter the sky in jagged fissures; ethereal sculptures and sharp architecture silhouette the district's skyline. Cannon blasts of thunder boom in the hollow of Jamison's chest, cutting down through his bones and to the soles of his boots, vicious and gripping, and it stirs the beast in his veins: gunfire, blood spatters, gnashing and breathing, adrenaline, chasing, closer, closer, the spark of his hammer, the rush of the swing, flames inking the dark, the scratch of the match, the familiar hiss of the fuse, closer, closer, closer—

"Boom," he says, and another crack splits overhead.

Beside him, Satya offers a judging look from beneath the hood of her cowl. Her golden eyes are half obscured by rich sable fabric laden with rainfall, but it does little to conceal her smirk. He supposes it should bother him that something so slight has such clout; her smiles are like the tight palpitating anticipation before sticking a syringe of the Old Blood in his thigh, the inevitable high moments away, a cross between the calling madness and a blood drunk haze.

It's not good for him, none of it ever is, but his health is the very least of his concerns.

"You're enjoying this," she says. Her tone is matter-of-fact, yet affectionate; it has that I told you so timbre he's come to know so well. "I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Surely you'd rather be someplace dry in this dreadful weather?"

"Yeah. Heaps of places I'd rather be. A flat in central Yharnam. Nice little cabin in the woods. Some dodgy inn with a good view of the gallows. Rubbish filled alley in the lower quarter. Nailed up on a spike. Snug in a noose." Grimacing, Jamison lifts the brim of his hat to shake off the water. Everything feels so bloody heavy in the rain. Even without his weapons of choice strapped over his back, it feels as if he's been choked to the bottom of the riverbed in swaths of wet blankets. "Hell, even under a tree would be better than this."

Satya makes an amused noise in the back of her throat. "If I didn't know any better, I'd think you were exaggerating."

"Yeah, well, if I had it my way, we wouldn't be here at all. Cathedral district's not so bad, but I don't like the bloody Choir sniffing about. Wish they'd bugger off."

Jamison glances up the hard-cut stone stairways that lead up in curved paths toward the district's imposing pinnacle: the Grand Cathedral. Its sharp, tapered spires decorate the lightning-struck skyline in a set of bared, rain-drenched fangs. Despite the downpour, scatters of white robed figures have begun their ascent, their Church-branded mantles heavy against their backs.

"Dodgy bastards." He lowers his voice and gives her a conspiratorial glance. "They got eyes in every building, you know."

She doesn't bother to look at him, but her tone of voice belies her stoic countenance. "I sincerely doubt that. The Church's numbers could never reach that high, not even with new additions, and you know as well as I do that the Choir only takes certain candidates."

"Right, fine, maybe not every building," he admits, a grin crooking his mouth, "but that don't mean it still can't feel like it. You ever get close enough to see their faces? They've got that thing on, dunno what it is—" He makes a vague gesture over his face. "Y'know, like a blindfold. It's like they don't even need eyes. Could just look right through the back of their heads and see everything. You trust 'em not to watch you? I know I don't."

"I wouldn't trust them at all, to be honest, but it isn't their blindness that bothers me. There are far more unsettling things about the Choir." Satya folds her hands beneath her cloak and takes a step closer to him, effortlessly falling in with his stride. Her shoulder presses against his left side, as if the very thought of the Choir's presence made her uneasy. "But you already know my feelings on the Church. We don't exactly have the best history."

"No, don't suppose you would. Not with the Vileblood." He shakes his head and tilts his hat to let more water slide down his shoulder. "Right nasty business."

"Indeed. And I'm certain there's more to come. Whatever the Healing Church has planned for Cainhurst is sure to be worse than the crude butchery here. Old Yharnam's fate may have been necessary, but it wasn't them who stole from the Church."

Even amongst the earthen scent of the rain and stone, Jamison can still recognize the spiced smell that permeates her clothes and the sleek finery beneath. It brings forth the memory the Hunt, traces of her whispering in the fog amongst the roots of the forest floor, soured by dark whips of blood and seeping poison. He clenches his teeth at the thought, as if sanguine and slaver still dripped from his mouth and chips of topaz still glared at him from across the hollow with the distant sound of hoarse, inhuman heaving settling like oil overtop the night's crisp silence.

He licks the side of his mouth and hangs a left.

"Y'know what I heard? About the bloke who nicked it."

"Something grisly, I'm certain. The Church was very cross about the whole ordeal, and I doubt there was any forgiveness."

"Too right," he says. "Don't remember his name, but he must've been some scholar or something 'cause he had proper rank to get through. Byrgenwerth keeps the Prospectors' stuff from the tombs, so all kinds of trinkets and treasure's stashed away there, but there was still some of that forbidden blood left behind. Dunno why you wouldn't just take the whole thing on the first go, but either way, apparently old Ludwig caught him coming back for round two. Now that's some right nasty business, innit? Gutted him right there in the hall, called him a bloody heretic, sworn enemy of the Healing Church and all that, committing 'atrocities' or whatever nicking a bit of blood is, then handed him off to the Choir." He grimaces, tongue between his teeth. "Reckon he's strung up in one of the clinics somewhere. Choir probably made the innards outards."

"I'm sorry—'outards'?" Satya eyes him from under her hood.

"Well, I mean, they were in once, right? Innards. Now they're out. Probably. Outards." He shrugs at her indifference, somewhat slighted that the humor seemed to be missed. "Anyway, I heard Logarius was saying he had half a mind to round up Cainhurst and do the same. Like you said, right? Grisly."

"That doesn't bode well. I suppose Cainhurst brought it upon themselves. Greed does that sooner or later. Of course, not that I don't savor the thought of slighting the Church, but…" She sighs, long and heavy, as if contrite for the weight of her kinsmen's deeds. "I understand why it was done. Cainhurst has always been resolute. Proud. Solitary. I don't know the man who brought the blood, but I do know Her Highness accepted it without a second thought. It was the promise of power. The problem is now that it's been administered, there is a want for more." The rhythm of the rain fills in the spaces between several ticks of silence. "The Vileblood was the wrong decision."

Jamison slows his pace as the cobblestone splits into three. The rain rolls in curving rivers below his feet, following the slope back down toward the inner city where they'd come. The center path snakes up to the very steps of the Grand Cathedral and its towering spires, its old stones soaked slate as white and black clad figures ghost to its open doors. The right path trickles down back out of the district, past rich residential housing and toward the encroaching reaches of the Woods. Left is the less travelled route that roots through less privileged alleyways, the poor and the pious gathering in the gutters to plead to passing Churchmen for a drop of the miracle panacea that cures any ail.

Biting his lip, he leads her left.

"D'you really think that?" he asks.

A brief pause. "Think what, exactly?"

"What you said 'bout Cainhurst. The Vileblood." Another clap of thunder rattles the window shutters clamped to the sills of the flat to his right. The storm seems louder than before, a creature's footsteps pounding closer and with malintent. "Little late for being wrong, innit? Already said and done. Rumor is all of Cainhurst downed it, and if the rest of that lot turned out anything like you, I'd say they was better off."

The heels of her shoes click across wet cobble to match his strides. "I think I will take that as a compliment."

"Right, sure, sure." He gives a noncommittal sniff. "Just seems sort of hypocritical for some noble who took the stuff anyway, right? Talking about wrong decisions and all. You still got what it gave you, so what's it matter if it's wrong?"

"I am allowed to have an opinion on my city's politics. Just because I am presently displaced from Cainhurst does not mean I can't criticize what path they chose." Satya eyes him from the cover of her cowl, drops of gold glinting at him in the sharp flashes of lightning. "You shouldn't lecture on hypocrisy, Hunter. You are barely human yourself. Or do you forget that minor detail because you don't look the part?"

"Don't look the part? Oi, that's not true. I got the chompers for it." Jamison affords her a wide grin, lip curling upward to show his teeth.

"Teeth are not what I am referring to," she says. Her own fangs bare in challenge.

Slowly, the humor begins to seep out of him. Sometimes he forgets just how much she knows. If the Hunt hadn't brought him to her, had the slavering monstrosity not intervened between the gnarled bodies of old oaks and pines, the Old Blood's palpable imprint might not have consumed him that night, and she would be none the wiser. Inscribing such a rune and giving in to its eldritch whispers is forbidden, as forbidden as the Vileblood or as Izzy's eccentric tools or a heretical stance against the Church, as Hunters should be bastions of humanity and not beasts, but it summons such strength, such dizzying power; he would be a fool not to tap into that terrifying well in moments of dire need.

And dire need it had been. Halfway through their altercation, he'd found himself faced with one of the very scourges he'd come to scour. He assumes it had been a proper wolfbeast once: skin in one piece, fur covering where it should, no mangling of the face, muzzle, or back. It must have been hiding in the thickest parts of the Forbidden Woods where the Yharnamites dared not tread. Judging from its extensive disfigurement, he imagines a Hunter had once chased after its hide in hopes of slaying it only to suffer at the clout of its poison, just as he had.

If things had gone differently, if the beast had never interrupted, if the transformation never took hold, if she'd simply had the chance, he would have been slain a far different way. Perhaps she would have harpooned his every extremity to the forest floor—a crystalline spike in his left hand, the meat of his right thigh, speared through his left ankle, plied through his right elbow, down in the tender dip beneath his chin—and held him there to agonize in ritual, body splayed like a fresh sacrifice, all until the Dream beckoned and left her with an offering of dust.

In every paragraph of their encounter, her body language spoke of murder, of precision, of self-preservation, of prowess. She would have dispatched him, and she would have done it beautifully—but the Old Blood swallowed him down, down, down, and the Old Blood does not come without its terrors.

"That never lasts long," he says. His voice keeps low despite the clamor of the storm. "And I don't let it happen here or anything like that. Not with the Choir and all them about. No one ever sees."

"I saw," she says.

He takes a moment to consider the claim. "Right. Well, you don't count."

"I don't count?"

"Well, if you lived here, yeah, sure, but you don't."

"You said no one ever sees. So, is that usual for you? Several Hunts have been called since that night, but I haven't seen it happen since."

"City hunting's different," he says stiffly, adjusting his stance to hop over a watery crater embedded in the road. "Yharnam's got crowds and heaps of eyes and ears. Well, not really crowds, I guess. Stragglers more like. The Hunt don't draw crowds. Not the good kind, anyway. Forest's much better for avoiding all that. You don't need to watch for anyone."

"Is that why you were there, then?"

Jamison glances to his left to catch her gaze, but she is focused on the road ahead, her hood drawn forward, her clothes soaked and lank. She still keeps close, the threat of the Choir still in her peripheral, and it grants him a twist of pleasure in the vault between his ribs.

"Might've been, yeah. Even if you don't follow the other Hunters, you can't just have a drop down at the pub while the rest of them's out butchering. Gotta keep scarce like the rest of Yharnam. Batten down the hatches, board up the windows, stay indoors with the bolt down." He gives a lighthearted shrug. "Some nights, I'd just rather walk on me own, you know? Moonlit night, lovely fog, couple of fat crows needing smashed, some ugly bugger in need of a good boom. Romantic, really. Nothing better than a little alone time."

"Do those particular romantic nights involve what I saw?" Her tone holds a teasing, inquisitive timbre over another shuddering crack of thunder.

"Sometimes, sure," he says. "It gets kind of hard after a while. Got real hazy in the middle of it this last time. It's all blurry, like you're trying to remember after some bad grog. Thought you one of them beasts and had a mind to kill you."

"That was before it happened. You are the one who attacked me, remember?" The pressure of her hand melds into the small of his back, sticking wet fabric to his skin. "Still, you had a change of heart. Admirable. It isn't often that a Hunter decides to spare his quarry. I suppose I should feel honored."

Prickles clamber up his spine at her touch. It shouldn't feel so intimate, but the last time someone placed their hand there, it was to shove him against a wall. "Well, weren't exactly in the position for sparing at the end there, y'know."

"This is true. Still, you could have decided to resume our encounter when you woke at the lantern." Her hand gradually withdraws. "But you didn't. I find that very curious."

"A sense of chivalry?" he offers.

Thunder claps overhead as she snickers into the collar of her cloak. "That is a poor excuse. The Church absolves you of all wrongdoing with your title. Your kind—you, especially—do not strike me as particularly chivalrous."

He puffs an exhale in offense. "Oi, that's not true. What kind of Hunters you been around?"

"Enough to know Hunters are killers. If they have the slightest inkling someone might succumb to beasthood, they are slaughtered. I have heard plenty about the doctors in black knocking on doors in the middle of the night." She pauses, the pattering rain filling in the spaces of her silence, and she laces her hands together in thought. "The entire city fears you, you know. You and the Church." It's somewhere above a whisper, misting in the rain. "Everyone remembers Old Yharnam."

"Yeah, I know. Seems a small price for living, don't it?" The smell of fresh antiseptic ghosts under his nose, and the bleary image of a blond woman hovering over him in Choir robes presses back behind his eyelids. His phantom hand stings. "Promise you, though, the Powder Kegs ain't like the rest. They're an upstanding lot. Friendly. Hospitable. Well, mostly."

"Powder Kegs?" she asks.

"My mates. We run the Oto Workshop, make stuff you could only dream about. Got all kinds of ideas. Explosives, trick weapons, design splices. The madder the better! It's how I got my hammer and my cannon, and the whirly saw. Always loved a good boom."

"Weapons for butchery, then," she says. "That does sound quite like the rest, if I'm not mistaken."

Jamison knots his fists into his coat pockets, a curse stuck in his throat. He's not sure why her prodding hurts. His downtime is spent in the company of other Hunters or those who share similar creeds in seeking the purge of beasts; the Oto Workshop has always been home. The citizens of Yharnam retreat to their stoops and stare through smudged windows while the Powder Kegs welcome him with bottles of pale ale and new designs scrawled out on old parchment. His exposure to Hunters has been through his own experience—hers has been through the obscurity of Cainhurst's veil and the Holy Blade's bloodthirsty entourage.

"The Kegs get more outta building than butchering, y'know," he mutters. The thrumming crack of another thunderstrike fissures through his bones and he savors the noise. "'If a weapon ain't got kick, it just ain't worth it.'"

"And what about you?" she asks.

"What about me?"

"Do you get more out of building than butchering?"

The rain slicks down his cheeks as he takes a glance up at the sky. Dawn remains obscured by the strengthening storm, blotted out and blackened to wet ash and sodden charcoal. "Why do you wanna know?"

"Because I know very little about you other than your status," she says. "I have certain assumptions about you from our first encounter, and from each subsequent encounter thereafter, but I can neither prove nor disprove them. It would give me a better idea of who I'm working with, and I think knowing both your allies and your enemies is equally important." Satya lifts her cowl with one hand. "And because the creature in my company is just as human as I am."

He blinks away rainwater and resumes his pace to hook down another alleyway to the right. He supposes this isn't really quite as personal as it feels. She does have a point, if he must be honest—and after all, it was his own reluctance to do his job that forged this odd partnership in the first place.

"Well, if you want honesty, yeah, I like putting everything together. Feels nice when it's all finished, 'specially if it's something new. Got a satisfaction to it, I guess. Discovery, trying new designs, pushing all your limits. I mean, you got a whole bloody arsenal to choose from—" He gestures to an imaginary replica of the Oto Workshop in a short sweep of his hand; the weaponry adorning the walls, the oiled wooden workbenches, the sharpening stones and blood gem tools, "—so why not give it a go, right? It'd be a waste otherwise. Talking with the others and snagging ideas ain't so bad. Even experimenting with blood gems's got its merits 'cause it makes you stronger for it. But books and papers's just books and papers. If you're hunting—"

He sucks in a damp breath through his teeth and seethes it back out into the rain as a plume of fog through the wrap of damp cloth over his mouth. The wet autumn air feels like a bottle of mint extract pouring into the spaces in his lungs.

"That's something else, that is. It's not just sitting around looking at parchment or melting down metal in the molds. It's more, right? It's more than that. More. It's that—that fuse, going after something that'll likely send you through hell, back to that misty place, some of those things more than twice your size and tearing everything apart. It's the blood, the chase, me heart pumping, smoke and fire and explosions—"

Jamison's hands curl up into claws and he hunches over at the phantom taste of gunpowder at the back of his molars. Rain pours over him in heavy sheets. He breathes, and it becomes a haggard thing, deep and guttural, something not quite human caged and humming behind gnashed teeth.

"It's got a… a real magic to it," he says, husky and raw. "It's like nothing else. Don't know how to explain it."

"I do. It's simple, really. It allows you to let go of humanity for a little while and reduces you to your basest instincts: kill or be killed." An indistinct purr of displeasure exhales from beneath her hood. Harshness lingers there; Cainhurst is talking in the Holy Blade's shadow. "But you are honest. I must give you credit for that. Not many would be so forthcoming. Many Hunters I've met have rehashed the same purity and cleansing rhetoric of the Church."

"Right, sure, good and proper Churchmen," he says. "If they say they don't enjoy it, they're telling porkies. The building takes learning, sure, but the butchering comes natural. At least I think it does. They're sort of choosy when making Hunters now 'cause of that. Didn't used to be from what I heard, just grabbing Yharnamites off the streets, but they made sure I wasn't afraid when they brought me in. The Old Blood's got its terrors, you know."

He reaches out to graze a gloved hand on the side of a building. His prosthesis beneath can't feel the smooth texture of old leather or the rough face of stone, brick, and mortar, but the pressure still runs up the length of his arm. It's not the familiar force of the boom hammer or the aching weight of the cannon, but it's comforting all the same.

"Butchering's what needs to be done," he says. "Or that's what the Church is on about, anyway. All I know is I'm a Hunter. I hunt. I build and butcher like the rest, and I like doing it. I'm not ashamed of it, either. S'what I was made for."

Satya taps her nails across her prosthetic knuckles somewhere beneath the cover of her cloak, mimicking the soothing static of rainfall. He remembers the motion, as it was something she'd done upon their initial meeting, and every meeting since. If he'd had the pleasure to know her in settings aside from the Hunt, perhaps in Castle Cainhurst's Grand Hall or during the scarce festivals the Church oversees, he might know to read it as impatience or nervousness, but instead he knows it as I am here and you talk too much.

"If that's truly your reasoning," she says, tap-tap, tap-tap, "then you should have slain me to begin with. A beast is a beast, is it not?"

Jamison clenches his jaw and digs his fingers into the leather of his palm. He isn't exactly one for moral quandaries considering his profession, but he must admit that she's right: justifying his choice in not killing a beast goes against the Hunters' creed.

She's not a beast, she isn't, but she is—the Vileblood took what she was and twisted it into something powerful, something complex, not unlike what the Old Blood has cursed him with. And it is a curse, he thinks, if only a small one compared to the savage creatures that stalk Yharnam's streets when the moon waxes into fullness.

The Mark emblazoned on his right bicep seems to burn.

"That… wasn't what needed to be done," he says.

Satya makes a displeased noise, unconvinced. "You're being inconsistent, Mister Fawkes. I took the blood, just like the others. The Vileblood changed me, just like the others. The only difference is that I became something with far less fur."

"Nah, not at all. You got it all wrong, mate. The difference is you waited." Scratching at his stubble, he twists his chin to the side and forces the crick out of his neck, pointedly avoiding her prying gaze. "Never had anyone wait for me before. All the other times I died, I had to go tromping back to find whatever killed me. Oh, not you, though. Thought—well, if you went to all the trouble to find the lantern and stake it out, surely you got a reason for waiting. All them that's cut down in the Hunt don't do anything like that. They're feral, right. Mindless. They don't get all calculated or scheming."

He pauses to study her features in the rain; her high cheekbones, the slope of her nose, the small birthmarks by her mouth and eye. Heavy drops drip down the brim of his hat, speckle over her brown skin, and curve in tiny rivers down the folds of her cloak. All the while, her eyes follow him with evident interest.

"You're different," he says. "You waited."

Amusement touches her lips in a svelte curve. "So, that was what set me apart from your prey? My civility? Not the bloodstone, my clothing, or my skills in combat?"

"Yeah, all right, those, too," he admits, "but even posh nobles become mindless monsters in their Sunday best. I seen proper ladies turn into wolfbeasts with pearls still 'round their necks."

"I am neither a proper lady nor a wolfbeast," she says.

Jamison stops mid-step and raises an eyebrow at her. "The hell you talking about? With those clothes and manners? You're as proper as they come. Queenly, even."

"Once, yes. Not anymore. Proper ladies do not partake in swordplay. Proper ladies do not hide away in the Forbidden Woods for fear of being seen. Proper ladies do not wake at night and sleep the sun away." The timbre in her voice grows icy. "Proper ladies do not feed."

Satya extends her left hand from beneath her cloak, allowing the blood gem fixed in the center of her prosthetic hand to gleam in the glints of lightning carving between laden thunderheads. Its color is dark, vivid, and seems to hold its own swirling storm within. Her fingers flex back and forth, the dark red metal collecting beading drops on its surface.

Jamison watches her turn her palm skyward, allowing water to collect on the blood gem's polished face. It truly is a beautiful stone, he thinks; he's never had the pleasure of seeing the coldblood take such a dark, rich color, or grow to such a generous size. Whoever cut it for her was skilled and shaped it with great purpose and precision, as it fits into the center of her hand as cleanly as the smoothed stones fit together into the Grand Cathedral's walls.

"Well," he says, "proper or not, you still got more class than the sorry lot 'round here. Posh bastards got themselves in a right mess what with all the beasthood cases breaking out. Don't like hanging around the common folk, right, 'specially not with the Ashen Blood still lingering about, so they just stay cooped up in their flats shouting rubbish in me ear when I walk by their windows. Might be better if they learned a bit of swordplay."

"Do you spar, Mister Fawkes?" she asks.

"Do I what?"

"Spar. Practice. With a partner." Satya takes her place at his left side again, her steps light and quick to keep pace. She curls her prosthetic fingers into a fist, crushed against the blood gem, and then retracts her arm back beneath the shelter of her cloak, her countenance assuming an air of curiosity. "I assume you've had some sort of sparring partner in the past with how well you fight, swordplay or otherwise. Despite your talents, no one is quite that natural. Am I wrong in my assessment?"

Jamison bites his tongue at the question. He is now suddenly reminded of just how wet and heavy his clothes are—and how hers must feel the same. Swordplay in the rain with soaked clothes. Might make it difficult to move, but he's hunted in worse conditions, if he's honest. Her dress might not be so accommodating, however, especially with such a low-cut neck.

Resuming his pace, he sinks his canine back down to banish the image and then smooths the flat of his tongue against the roof of his mouth to dull the pain. The thought of another clash with her ignites a fierce spark in the tinder lining his ribs. His heartbeat throbs in his neck as the forest comes roiling back: thick mist clinging to the back of his tongue, damp earth entrenched behind his nails, the rotten, sour breath of the Other, the ethereal glitter of bloodblades catching shards of moonlight, the sweet fragrance of perfume and herbs and life.

Her prowess is intoxicating, even in memory.

"I had one, yeah," he says at last. "Was a long while back for learning how to use the new arm and leg. Well, was new back then. I don't really do it so much anymore 'cause no one's really keen on it, not with the Hunt being called as often it is. Not as many new Hunters to bash in, either. 'Sides, the lug says he's getting old. He just don't like getting his arse beat, is all."

Reminded of his mentor, he digs deep into his left coat pocket and dregs up the pale moonstone from within. Mako had given it to him when he'd had the Hunter's Mark inked on his right bicep; something to hold onto while they inscribed proof of indoctrination into the order of the Healing Church's Hunters on his skin. The old Hunter was peerless in combat—and still is, if he must be truthful—and Jamison knows he couldn't have asked for a better mentor.

"You know," he says, smoothing the moonstone among his gloved fingers, "it feels like he was a hell of lot more forgiving than you are. When I mucked up, at least he said something about it 'stead of sticking a blade in my gut."

"Oh, I am quite forgiving." Craning her neck upward, she offers him a thin smile. Her canines draw his attention, their sharpness accentuated by the shape of her mouth. "For me, our previous altercation meant life or death. You don't face that sort of danger. You only go to the Dream, don't you? You have no fear of death. If you make a mistake, there are no consequences. Dying is only temporary."

"Don't make it any less painful," he mutters, mustering a sour look in reply. The stone continues to glide along his thumb and forefinger. The leather of his glove hinders its temperature and texture, but the action keeps him focused. "Bleeding out and sucking down poison's not exactly a fun way to die, you know."

"To be honest," she says, "I've never heard dying to be much fun to begin with."

He presses the stone into his right palm and crushes it tight. "You heard right, love."

Overhead, the storm continues to rage. The loud crack of thunder reverberates off slick stone and wet windowpanes. Whips of lightning harpoon across the darkened sky in crackling splits, closer and closer together from the din of each thunderstrike. Thick runnels rush in the grooves worn into the road between the stone, the water mimicking beds of mortar. The worst is yet to come, he can tell; the wind is starting to rise and cut down Yharnam's alleys with stinging raindrops on its coattails.

"How much farther is it?" Satya's voice struggles over the downpour.

"We're close," he says. Squinting under a harsh sheet of rainfall, he peers through the mist to take stock of the way ahead. "Real close. Should be somewhere up ahead. Not far now."

Dodging fastly growing puddles, Jamison leads her toward the end of the cobbled alley to a short set of slate stone steps. At their zenith, the street continues in a crooked curve down a line of quaint shops with which he is all too familiar; knickknacks, candles, herbs, and bookshops flank both sides of the street, all adorned by hanging wooden signs that sway in the strength of the passing gusts. One sign about halfway down the alley has The Black Flagon carved out in bold, silver text written into an inky midnight sign, the shape of a tankard pouring off the side. It's an old establishment with splintering windowpanes and faded paint, but the management is close with the Powder Kegs. It isn't the Workshop, but it's as close as he's like to get.

When he steps inside, the warmth of the room envelops his face and unfurls around his neck and limbs. The state of his clothes brings a lake of water with his boots and pools over the already soaked rug decorating the foyer. Ahead, a large hearth roaring with a lively fire is tucked against the left wall, its mantle decorated with various styles of flagons. Patrons of all sorts lounge around the common room, some less dry than others. Wet footprints trail from the threshold and split into different paths, some headed for the fire while others veer right and climb upstairs toward their rented rooms.

With Satya behind him, he tugs off his drenched hat with prosthetic fingers and makes his way to the front counter. Behind it, a shaggy brown-haired man in a sharp gunmetal waistcoat appraises him with interest. His left arm is missing from the bicep down, and his white shirt beneath is fastened in a knot by the elbow. He scratches at his thick beard before lifting his hand in a casual wave, and then reaching across for one of the many keys poised on hooks on the wall at his side.

Jamison inwardly groans. He had assumed one of the discreet little ladies would be manning the desk, or maybe the management's son. Instead, they have it manned by an active Powder Keg.

Well, no, he amends; 'active' might be too generous a descriptor. This particular Powder Keg has not attended a Hunt in a while, but he still participates in the Workshop's projects. The only bloody reason he's here instead of out on the town with the other Kegs is because he lost his arm a couple weeks ago, and the short bloke at the Oto Workshop is still scrounging up quicksilver to fashion him a brand new one. While Jesse McCree could definitely hunt one-handed, he would be at a severe disadvantage, and the beasts of Yharnam aren't exactly known for their leniency.

Jamison braces himself. When he gets back to the Workshop, he will never hear the end of this.

"Well, well, if it ain't Hunter Fawkes," says Jesse, leaning forward to rest his good arm upon the countertop. "No extra fires this time, I see. That's a good sign. What're you doing here so early? I was figuring you'd be gone a while."

Jamison wrinkles his nose. "I was gone a while. What, not long enough?"

"Hey, all right, I'm not judging. You always do your share. Trust me, you ain't the only one back before sunrise." Jesse grins and holds out a single key by the pad of his index finger. "So, the usual, right? Or you need extra, uh…" Burnt umber eyes cut to Jamison's back, to Satya and her sodden cloak and cowl. "… accommodations?"

"Nah, usual's fine, mate. Don't need nothing special." Jamison swipes the key from him before he can yank it out of reach; a part of the Kegs' usual fare. He then deposits both the moonstone and the key into the damp reaches of his pocket. Pivoting on his heel, he motions to Satya with two fingers and starts toward the stairs.

Jesse leans his elbow on the counter, jaws squared, cheeks pinched in amusement. "Good blood guide your way, Fawkes. Not that you'll need it."

Jamison stuffs his hat back over his head and glares over his shoulder. "Keep your gob shut, McCree."

"Sure, sure, sure. Not a word. Cross my heart." With a flick of his wrist and a hearty chuckle, he waves farewell. "Hey, just give a holler if you need something, all right? Ale, sheets, a hot meal, whatever. You know this place takes pride in service, and the Kegs are always welcome here."

"Wanker," Jamison mutters, and starts the ascent.

On the second floor, Satya silently follows in his footsteps as he drips down wooden floorboards and passes the other rooms. The one at the very end of the corridor matches the etched numerals on the key's flat face: 204. Jamison half expects Jesse to have given him the wrong key for the sole purpose of making him trod back downstairs to explain the cloaked woman in his company (because that is absolutely something Jesse would do just to see Jamison squirm), but to his relief, the one marked 204 fits the lock and pops it open.

Inside, the room is as plain and simple as it always is. A sizable bed with fresh white linens leans against the left wall, coupled with a small nightstand and a lit oil lamp. Two nondescript wooden chairs and a matching table are tucked toward the right half of the room next to the central support column. A curtained window overlooks them, its drapes thin and red and fluttering with the draft. There is a stone fireplace in the corner, mouth smudged with copious streaks of soot; its upper column tapers thin and looks like it might connect to the common room's chimney from where it's positioned. Beside it, a bed of splintered firewood and snapped kindling rests in a cradle of wrought cast iron. Despite the sparseness of the room and lack of decorative flair, it's enough to suit his needs—most nights, anyway.

Satya enters first, stepping past him with a quiet urgency. She drifts to the table and chairs, pausing to glance out the parted curtains, then to the fireplace, the carpet, the bed, assessing. Once he enters and shuts the door behind him, instating the chain and turning back the lock, she finally brings her hands to her hood and draws it down, the black swath of her hair curling out from beneath. Running her nails through it to straighten the damage the rain had inflicted, she tsks, displeased with its behavior, but gives the room around her an approving nod.

"Not bad, yeah?" Jamison removes his hat once more and hangs it on the back of one of the chairs. Water droplets trickle from its ends, collecting on the floorboards beneath. "Cold now, but nothing a little fire can't fix."

"I've certainly seen worse," she says. "It's a little dusty, but this should do for the time being. It will at least allow for rest. How long does the proprietor allow you to stay?"

He gives a shrug as he tugs away the facewrap and plucks at his silver coat clasps. "As long as I want, really. Powder Kegs practically own this dodgy shack. Wouldn't mind if I popped in for a fortnight. Don't matter much to them."

"I would hardly call this a dodgy shack," she says.

"Right. Well, might as well be with what you're used to. Cainhurst's got those nice homes, don't it? Not like the shoddy flats here. Heard the Castle's lovely."

"It indeed is quite lovely," she affirms, tending to the fastening on her cloak. "You should see it in winter. Her Highness has impeccable taste."

Jamison grits his teeth as he shuffles himself out of his black coat. Heavy and wet, its ends graze the floor as he sets it overtop his hat on the chair. He tugs on the blanched material of his long-sleeved shirt beneath his waistcoat; peeling it away from his stomach summons unpleasant prickles between his shoulder blades. His trousers aren't quite as wet thanks to his boots, but with his hair a lank mess and his upper half quite thoroughly damp, getting dry might take a touch longer than anticipated.

After he removes his gloves and boots and allows his quicksilver prosthetics a chance to dry, he takes the opportunity to assess his remaining inventory. Save for the weight of one trusty syringe and a tiny silver bell, the pouch hooked to his belt is empty; his participation in the night's Hunt drained each precious blood vial down to sanguine stained glass. The opposite pouch holds a dwindling supply of quicksilver bullets, bolstered by four extra that were spun into being by his own blood. The pistol still strapped to his left thigh uses two per shot, and although it does in a pinch, it isn't nearly as effective as his cannon. Beside the familiar shape of his Powder Keg badge, one of the front pockets of his coat still holds the materials for a molotov cocktail, and another holds a bottle of white tablets used as an antidote for the Ashen Blood. A small leather drawstring purse stuffed with a variety of shining coins hides in yet another pocket sewn in the right breast, and a slim bottle of crushed bone marrow is strapped to the inner lining just below it, yielding only a quarter left.

Well, he thinks, it certainly isn't the best state of things, but it isn't the worst, either. He'll need to pay the Oto Workshop another visit before they leave this side of Yharnam. Replenishment is important, but he misses his weapons more than anything else. He falls with them still in his hands and he wakes with them in the Dream. The absence of the boom hammer and his trusted cannon leave him with a strange sense of vulnerability, the kind that lingers in the room after a lucid nightmare; the thick silence, the crushing weight over his chest, the prickling knowledge that something was once there in the pooled black of the Clinic but the rest of him was strapped to a gurney in paralysis with a dark needle plunged in the bend of his arm and no matter how he tried to move he couldn't turn to see the source of the breathing.

Jamison pinches his eyes shut to blot it out. With a rough exhale, he begins to unstrap the pouches on his belt.

"You use vials?" he asks, unclipping the one containing the bell and the syringe.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean like what I use. Saw you down a vial or something like it when we met." He sets the pouch on the table next to his gloves. It's damp, too. Thankfully quicksilver doesn't rust. "You know, to help you get patched up again. Not sure how it is with you. You use 'em like that?"

"In a way, yes, I suppose I do," she replies. Shuffling comes from her half of the room, and the scrape of high heels against the surface of old, creaking wood. "I find consumption serves me better than injection. Potency matters."

Ah. Communion. Of a sort, anyhow. Not quite the brand the Healing Church pedals. He imagines all the pomp, circumstance, and pious ceremony are pruned and gutted from this particular procedure. She is practical and appropriate and despises the Church with nearly all of her being; surely it carries a different significance than the shadowy rituals conducted in the Grand Cathedral's dank, incense-choked hall.

"You got enough of 'em?" he asks. "Don't know 'bout you, but all mine's gone."

Satya pauses before answering, as if the thought just occurred to her. "Mine are as well. I used the final one this evening."

Jamison unclips the other pouch and places it by its partner. He flips it open to check the number of bullets present—ten, including the bloodmade four—and then pats it shut again.

"The Workshop should have more," he says. "Could probably nick you a handful if you wanted. Might not be ideal or anything, but some's better than none, yeah?"

"Not exactly my first choice for a source," she says, a hint of disdain lacing her voice at the institution's mention, "but you're right. I would rather have some than none at all. It would tide me over until I'm able to procure more. I appreciate it."

"No worries," he says, and glances to Satya to find her standing half naked by the fireplace.

The thick sable cloak has already been hung upon the opposite chair as his own gear, her shoes discarded a healthy distance away as to not collect any excess water. Somehow she'd managed to slip out of her red dress and hang that as well, and all that's left in its place is a tight black corset cinched around her waist, a set of dark stockings drawn up long, thick legs, and a pair of black panties to hide the rest. Her delicate shoulders stand exposed, as are her ample thighs and hips, and the sight hammers a bolt of electricity down the column of his spine.

"Can you light this?" she asks, and nods to the collection of firewood at the hearth's edge. If she is bothered at all by his presence in her current state, she doesn't show it.

"I, uh—" Jamison eats the rest of his sentence. What had he been doing again?

"I don't happen to have any matchsticks. If I did, I think we'd most likely find them too wet to use." Her rich hair, no longer kept in place with gold, leather, or pins, has fallen to the lower sweep of her back to cover up the crossed laces of the corset. Stray pieces curl at her temples, victims to the humidity. "You don't have any, do you?"

His tongue feels as if it's been transmuted into lead. His left hand gropes for where his coat pocket once was in search of the moonstone, but is met with the damp fabric of his trousers and the worn leather of an old belt. Did he have matchsticks somewhere? He can't remember.

Arms crossed over the swell of her breasts, Satya turns away from the hearth and takes a half step toward him. Her forehead remains creased in thought. Perhaps it was due to the shade of her cowl or the light stolen by the thunderheads, but he doesn't remember her looking quite so tired while on the journey here. The gold of her eyes seems less vibrant, muted by the gentle marks thumbed beneath them in pressed crescents. Despite how regally she carries herself, it looks as if something has its claws clamped over her bare shoulders and is forcing her posture askew.

Jamison struggles to think. What was it again? Matchsticks? Matchsticks. She's cold. Yes. Obviously. Matchsticks.

Words caught under his tongue, he holds one finger up to her as a gesture to wait and strides over to the bed on the left-hand side of the room. His quicksilver foot makes an odd thump-clink retort as the hinges work back and forth, back and forth, adjusting to his movement. When he reaches the nightstand adorned with the oil lamp, matchsticks matchsticks, he forces a hard swallow to shut out the heartthrum in his ears and wrenches open the tiny wooden drawer with a little too much force.

Inside, a twine-bound bundle of flammable sticks waits at the bottom—probably a bloody poor decision to keep them under the presence of an oil lamp, come to think of it; that's another Old Yharnam waiting to happen, now, isn't it?—each about a finger's length and tipped with a hardened paste of chemicals that would be sure to catch fire under friction. He snatches the bundle, draws two out from the twine, and pops the drawer shut again with his fist.

As Jamison crosses the room and sinks to his haunches in front of the hearth, he tries his best to ignore her lack of clothing. He doesn't know what he expected; with the severity of the storm, she was bound to be soaked to the bone. She is a creature of the blood, just as he is, so illness is less than likely, but that doesn't mean she has to stand in drenched clothes all night. He isn't that cruel.

With the matchsticks in one hand, he reaches out with his prosthesis for a log of firewood and tosses it into the fireplace's sooty chamber. Two additional logs follow, and then a handful of small twigs and some fibers of dried grass tucked in between the bark and settled over top. Biting the edge of his lip, Jamison settles the wrapped bundle of matchsticks at his knee, and then strikes the separated two across the weathered stone of the hearth. With a satisfying scrape, both burst into plumes of fire—he eyes them with deep reverence, the spark of his hammer and the lit mouth of a moltov smudged across his mind's eye—and he then carefully guides them over to light the tufts of grass and between the logs before tossing them in to complete the pyre. Orange yellow curls of flame engulf the offering with joyous avarice, and soon consume the dried bark and jagged splinters in a swath of heat.

"Right. There, should be good." After he nudges the bundle safely toward the cradle of firewood, he plants his hands on his haunches and lifts himself back onto his feet. "It might take a while to get the whole place warm, but should pass by quick. And looks like we got plenty of tinder, so if it decides to gutter out in a while, I can always make another."

"Thank you, Mister Fawkes. I appreciate it." Satya snares his attention with a glance; a slender smile shapes her countenance into something less stoic, less guarded, and more of the quixotic young noblewoman before the touch of the Vileblood. Thick black hair frames high cheekbones and a tempting mouth. As she tucks a lock behind her ear, a dark red crystalline earring is revealed by her jaw. "It seems you have other talents than simply hunting beasts. Hunter or not, you are quite convenient to have around."

A tightness he hadn't realized nesting inside his chest slowly begins to dissolve. "Uh, thanks? I… I think."

"I trust we'll leave in the evening?" She brushes past him to retrieve the chair with her clothes strewn over top.

"Yeah. Reckon it should be dark enough by then. Easier on the eyes." He forces his gaze to the fire, watching as licks of blue unfurl from the dried logs and meld with drapes of red and orange. The colors remind him of the spark burning at the end of his hammer, and his fingers coil together as if the haft were thrust between them. "Before we leave, I need to stop by the Workshop and nick a few things. I don't like not having anything with me."

Satya pushes the chair closer to the fireplace and angles it so her clothes get full exposure to the heat. "You have plenty with you. A pistol isn't enough?"

Jamison feels to the grip at his thigh with his left palm. The metal is cold, damp, and slick against his skin. It isn't the moonstone, but it's something.

"No," he replies, indignant. "It's just not the same. It'd be like if you didn't have that rock in your hand. No blades, no whips, nothing. Just you in the flesh with a gun that don't sing."

"I'm sorry? Sing?"

"Yeah. Sing." He slides it up from its holster, the double barrels heavy and ungainly compared to its far slighter cousin. "Every one of em's got a voice. Least it seems like to me. I can shoot this one just fine. It's not difficult or anything, but it just doesn't feel like the others. Right, here—see for yourself."

As he flips it about grip first and holds it out to her, expectant, his eyes trail down the cords in her neck to the pronounced line of her collarbone. Small, dark brown speckles like the one by her mouth and the trifecta sprinkled on her left cheekbone decorate the smooth planes of her shoulders and the ample valley elevated by her corset. Two spaced like the mark of a bite fleck across her right breast, just before the reach of soft silk. As he follows the cinched garment's thin, golden floral patterns skimming down her slimmed waist, a part of him wonders how she's still bloody breathing.

Satya assesses the pistol with narrowed eyes. With her fangs pressed into her bottom lip, she takes the butt in her right hand, inspecting cold quicksilver with a knit brow and thinned lips. When he lets go of the barrel, she takes a sharp inhale in surprise at the sheer weight.

"This is quite impressive, though a little heavy," she says. "Did your Kegs make this piece?"

"Nah. Not our work. Too plain." He sniffs derisively at the weapon. "The Healing Church Workshop proper designed that."

Satya mouths a silent oh before lifting the firearm with both hands and aligning her aim with the hearth. To his pleasure, she doesn't struggle with keeping it aloft. He's sure he only got a taste of her strength in that clearing, and the bestial blood in him yearns for more.

"You know," she says, closing one eye as if to aim down ironsights, "I would have thought two barrels would have been more than innovative enough for you. Too plain? Truly?"

"Truly," he says. "Two barrels isn't thinking outside the box. If I was making firearms, I wouldn't build something so bloody small. Don't pack near enough punch. I want something out of the ordinary, ideally with a little fire involved. You know, something that could just drop me. The only thing a tiny pistol like that's like to drop is some poor mutt. Even if the blood in you works well with it, there's just not enough power."

"Hm. I suppose." Satya gives it another once over, as if testing the idea. "If you insist."

Jamison begins to unstrap the holster around his thigh, unbuckling tarnished brass and wet leather with fumbling fingers. Focusing is difficult, and he wishes he'd taken the moonstone out of his pocket. His mind keeps drifting to places it shouldn't: peeling off her stockings inch by inch, gliding his hands against her hips, tugging her corset down past the birthmark bite, leaning her against the bed—

"Could… probably build off one of their rifles, though, come to think of it," he says, pinching the metal prong of the buckle into his palm. Pain reroutes his thoughts elsewhere; he concentrates on the old sheets of schematics scrawled on faded swaths of parchment back at the Workshop. "Church rifles ain't half bad. Barrel's a little long, but they're big enough. Nice and sturdy. Good design overall. Maybe give it a counterweight for balance, add one of those attachments on the end. Make it trick as a lance. You'd probably have to saw off some of the end to make room, sure, but as long as it still fires, shouldn't be a problem."

"That sounds a little excessive," she remarks.

Movement skims his peripheral, but he ignores it.

"Nah, not excessive. Not at all. Nothing is when you're on the Hunt. Never know what's hiding. I been pounced more times than I can count. Not so fun when you round an alley and some mangy half-crazed mongrel guts you with a pitchfork." He tugs the holster free, encircles it in its leather straps, and gives it a casual toss toward the tabletop. It makes a light thump as it hits the wood. "Rather be nice and prepared than dying on some street corner."

Satya turns from the hearth on the ball of her foot and approaches the table, pistol in hand. "How is that for you?"

"How's what?"

"Dying. The Dream. Awakening."

Satya slides the firearm back into its worn leather holster with care, and then pauses to consider him with stark golden eyes. He's seen countless creatures skulking in the dark recesses of Yharnam's streets, each with the same stare of lit coals that glint together in the sweep of torchlight, all steeped in madness and mindlessness and murder, and she shares none of it. She is something else, something beyond the sickness that the citizens of Yharnam have succumbed to; she is potency and prowess and potential.

"Hunters tend not to talk about it," she says carefully. "Well, not with… 'common folk,' as you put it. I'm not sure why. It seems like it's some sort of secret, but it's known that ever since Old Yharnam, the Hunters of the Church have stopped dying. It's always made me curious."

Jamison licks the side of his mouth and starts to unbuckle his black waistcoat. The sooner he can sit by the fire and dry off the better. "Why d'you wanna know?"

A second's pause, a smirk at her lip, and then, "Immortality truly is an interesting concept, isn't it?"

"Now you're starting to talk like those scholars. That shonky Byrgenwerth lot." He struggles with one of the pewter latches midway down, and finally manages to pry it loose with the pad of his thumb. "All that about ascension and finding enlightenment. Immortality sounds like something they'd go on about."

"Perhaps. It wouldn't be surprising. The College is known for its studies into the celestial, after all." Slowly, she approaches the fireplace once more. The floorboards protest beneath her feet in quiet groans; slender golden chains chime around her ankles. "Still, I doubt they're alone. I think all of us look to live a little longer than we should. The blood makes that possible, doesn't it? Why do you think the Church is distributing ministrations like it is?"

"A cure. Or that's what they all say, anyway. 'Bout half of Yharnam got the Ashen Blood a while back. Right nasty sickness if you ever seen it. Heaps of people died. Would've spread like wildfire if it wasn't for the Healing Church and those ministrations. Don't get me wrong, I don't like Byrgenwerth and I don't like the Choir, but I ain't gonna snub what they did." He loosens the waistcoat's final clasp. "I suppose it is looking to live a little longer, innit?"

Satya cocks her head, eyes narrow. "They helped you. The Healing Church. They helped you, didn't they?"

Jamison doesn't reply. Instead, he shrugs out of the black swath of wet fabric and peels the dingy white shirt beneath off his body. Even with the fire crackling in the hearth, gooseflesh still ripples up his arms and pricks thin hairs down the back of his neck. Bunching both garments together in his prosthetic fingers, he makes his way over to where his coat and hat hang limply off the chair's back and drapes them over top of them both. A part of him considers mimicking her and scooting the chair within the heat's direct range, but he discards the idea—they won't be leaving for another twelve hours at the very least, and it should be more than dry by then.

Rolling out the crick in his shoulder, he plods back over to the warmth of the fire. Satya stands by at an angle, half inspecting the cast iron tools that accompany the collection of dried firewood, and he averts his gaze from the silk of her stockings to keep himself focused. He sits down in front of the snapping flames, his left knee bent beneath him, and he rolls up the fabric of his right leg to let his prosthesis breathe. The silver beneath his trousers is damp, with dewy beads of water clutching to the ankle joints and the robust mechanics of his knee. He wrinkles his nose and gives his leg a good shake before stretching it out toward the sooty opening of the hearth.

"Dying's a bit like drowning, I guess," he says, closing his eyes and soaking in the heat. "Gets really hard to breathe, like someone's got their hand 'round your neck, choking you out. Hurts, too, but that's always from whatever got you—axe, torch, claws, fangs, all that. Maybe a knife if they got one on 'em and their mind ain't gone enough to use it. It sort of builds up, just keeps building and building 'til you can't take it anymore. Then everything starts getting all blurry, right, light starts fading, everything's hazy, then it's like all your feeling floats away. Next thing you know, boom, you're face down in the dirt with stones and flowers up your nose. S'like blacking out and coming to after a real bad night, only no headaches, no drymouth, no pain. Just… quiet. Bit of wind. Old smells."

Beside him, Satya combs through her hair in slow, gentle strokes. The metal of her left hand burns crimson in the firelight. "It sounds beautiful. Worlds away from Yharnam, from how you describe it."

"Yeah. Must be. No idea where it is, honestly. All I know is if I die, I get sent there instead of to whatever hell I belong in." He works his jaws, rolling the mechanical joint in his ankle to coax the water out. "Reckon it's some kind of purgatory or something. It's always evening there. Moon's out. When I first woke up with all the gravestones, mist, old shop in the distance, I thought I was dead."

"That must have been frightening for you," she says. "Young Hunter, first death on the Hunt. But instead of dying, he gets transported to another place altogether. Did nobody warn you?"

He shrugs. "I knew something were supposed to happen when it all got too much. All of 'em talked about it. Just didn't know what. Waking up in a garden on top of a bloody pillar in some weird place? Didn't expect that."

"No. No, I suppose not. You wouldn't have believed them anyway if they'd told you, would you?" Her fingers curl through stark midnight and twist through tangled knots, her knuckles hooking in between them and working them loose. "You do seem rather… stubborn."

"Pff, like you're not stubborn. You got that noble blood in you. Proper Cainhurst stock." He nods up at her. "Now that's stubborn."

"Stubborn is not the presence and utilization of manners," she says pointedly. "Stubborn also is not the opportunity of knowing your place. Stubborn is, however, refusing to die. Do you know exactly how you looked in the forest that night?"

Jamison bites his tongue in reply. He can only guess.

"It was…" She licks at her bottom lip, and her brow draws tight. "Gruesome. Yes, I think that's a good way to describe it. Gruesome. And I thought I'd seen the beasts the Knights brought to the Castle in poor shape. Despite the Vileblood, the Knights have no tolerance for beasthood—anything with claws, fur, teeth, clammy skin, or other symptoms is promptly disposed of. Not entirely unlike you Hunters, I suppose. Decapitations, torn limbs, eviscerations. Quick and efficient for the most part. Artistic in others. But you somehow surpassed them all. You were… mutilated."

Her face is etched in what he can only interpret as concern. That bad, was it?

"All part of the job," he says, flicking a hand in dismissive acceptance. "You get used to it after a while. Then it don't happen as much 'cause you learn better. It's just a process, is all."

"But doesn't it bother you? Dying to beasts or fire or whatever else? You said yourself it isn't painless. To die and go to the Dream seems less harrowing than simply dying, but it still must be difficult to endure, is it not?"

"Nah. I mean, the dying's hard, sure, but not the rest of it." He grins up at her, his left hand clamped over his shoulder. The Mark feels warm beneath his fingertips. "Just means I get to hunt the bastards who killed me. And it's always a good hunting, you know. They go out with a real nice bang."

Satya guides a stray lock behind her ear. "Your hammer."

"And a cocktail or two," he says, jamming his thumb back toward the table where his coat hangs with a vial of explosive materials stuffed in its pocket. "Makes roast beasts just fine."

"That is a rather… unsavory thought," she says.

"Eh, a charred beast is a dead beast. Don't make a difference how they die so long as they're not terrorizing the place or spreading the plague to somebody else. If they get cooked in the process, that ain't my worry." Jamison bobs his shoulders in a noncommittal shrug. "I'm not paid for street cleaning."

"No, I wouldn't think so. Yharnam does seem to be lacking in both hearses and proper means of corpse disposal from how many coffins still line the streets. I doubt there are dedicated teams to scrub after cooked carcasses if they can barely keep after their dead."

"Oi, c'mon now. You don't have to say it like that. We got ourselves a lovely city. Beautiful views, if anything. Don't fancy caskets much, do you?"

"I'm not particularly enthusiastic about them, no," she says.

Jamison, amused, cackles behind his hand. "Well, you oughta be glad you wasn't around several years back. You should've seen Yharnam when the Ashen Blood got hold of it. So many bodies, the bloody Church didn't know what to do with 'em all. You can only bury so many, you know; only got so much ground 'round here. That's why Yharnam's got so many cemeteries, and that's why Hemwick's got its job in fires now. Turns out chucking heaps of corpses into a hot furnace frees up some prime real estate." He pinches his nose and holds up his palm toward the snapping pyre, as if to reject its contents. "If you thought cooked beasts was bad, rotting bodies're far worse."

"I don't doubt it. You can smell the crematorium's work from the Woods if the winds are right." She scrunches up her face in disgust. "It isn't a pleasant smell."

"Could be worse," he says. "Could always be down by the aqueducts, right?"

Pursing her lips, she only nods in agreement.

A tenuous silence starts to settle in, broken only by the heavy cracks of thunder from outside that rattle the windowsill and the wood paneling in the walls. Ahead of him, the fire has flourished with a bright and healthy strength, all of the tinder greedily devoured into blackened husks as the logs beneath char and crackle. Welcome heat spreads throughout the rest of the room, albeit gradually; the air has just begun to lose its damp chill, and it coaxes the moisture out of his hair and trousers and the glinting quicksilver of his prosthetics.

It's strange, he supposes. Normally during poor weather or after a particularly difficult Hunt, he'd rest for only a short while before gathering his things and heading out into the streets again. He sees very little sleep as it is, and wasting time cooped up in a rented room would be better spent elsewhere—the Workshop, he thinks, and his waiting projects. Travelling with someone else greatly restricts his choices, something he isn't quite used to, not since he was younger, and it makes him restless to think of things he'd much rather occupy himself with than sitting in front of a fireplace with a prim and proper noble sharing his living space.

But it isn't terrible. Not really. It's out of the ordinary, yes, but he doesn't mind it. Could be worse, after all.

Somewhere beside him, Satya begins to drum on her prosthetic knuckles, tap-tap, tap-tap, a precise and tinny rhythm over the white noise of the fire. He expects her to retire to the featherbed with morning so close—and she can have it; he has every intention of having a lie down by the fire—but she remains still, standing, jaw set and gooseflesh prickling up her right arm. Her presence is almost unnerving, especially in her current state of undress, and it wrings a coil of tension between his shoulder blades.

"You don't smell like the others," she says suddenly.

He pauses, puzzled, and his gaze darts to her in question. "What?"

"You're different."

Satya pointedly avoids his inquisitive stare, gathering her hair and letting it fall behind her shoulders as she twists on the soles of her feet to face the hearth. Her bare, brown skin takes on a fierce and fiery sheen in the wake of the flickering flames, the hard muscle in her calves and thighs accentuated by the contrapposto curve in her posture. If she were draped in a wet sheet, he'd swear she were carved from marble or some other luxurious stone; her lineaments rival that of the elegant statues flanking the sharp steps up to the Grand Cathedral.

Jamison's mind strays as the fire drifts back into view. He'd certainly love to see her draped in a wet sheet. In fact, he'd love to see her without her corset and other pesky pieces of clothing. If she'd let him, he wouldn't mind sliding off her stockings, thumbing the laces apart down the dip of her back, coaxing her onto the featherbed, squeezing between her perfect thighs—

"You mentioned I was different, too, didn't you?"

"What?" Startled, he jolts out of his less than appropriate train of thought and snaps his attention away from the maw of the fireplace again.

She appraises him with a stern look. "I didn't think you found me quite that droll, Mister Fawkes."

"What?" If he could stop saying that word, things would be bloody fantastic.

"If you'd rather not talk, I understand. It isn't exactly like we have much in common, you know, considering our backgrounds. I don't mean to force conversation on you. I just thought perhaps you'd—"

"No!" he says, and perhaps with a little too much vigor; the heat from the fire now seems paltry, embodying a matchstick compared to the live cinders that seem to have taken residence underneath his sternum.

"No?" Her prosthetic fingers poise half curled, as if threatening to summon a thin whip of blade from the center of her palm.

"No," he says again, softer this time; "no, all right, it's fine, you're not… you're not droll or anything. Hell, I'd be conked out by now if I thought you boring. I just was thinking—" He then clamps a hand over his mouth; no, come on now, why would divulging any of that be a good idea, bloody drongo, and then mumbles "—'bout the Workshop" between his fingers, as if the Kegs' personal workshop could ever make him think that intently about anything let alone leaving him utterly stupefied and staring at a lit hearth like he'd had the very soul sucked out of him.

With a bemused countenance, Satya tilts her head. "You don't mind, then."

"'Course not," he says, and turns himself about from the hearth so that he sits raptly at attention—and pressing his metal fingers painfully into the back of his hand to ensure that the rest of him is far less so.

She raises one eyebrow, appraising, and then nods before returning her attention to the cast iron cradle of firewood. With the side of her foot, she nudges it closer to the hearth and aligns it parallel to the stone. The chain around her ankle jingles as she resumes her previous posture, and before he can ask why, she's shimmying down the silk of her left stocking.

"I'm in quite a predicament," she says. A short, staccato sound follows, one that almost seems like a laugh; it rings with the sweet tenderness of bells. "Now that the forest is out of reach, I wish I'd brought another set of clothing. My foresight seems rather lacking, doesn't it?"

Jamison can do nothing but swallow.

Draping the long spindle of fabric across the bend of her arm, she attends to the golden chain on the other ankle. A ruby droplet connects the two ends, sized like a button, and she runs her thumb over its surface before unfastening it and pooling it into her palm.

"You said I wasn't like the other beasts," she says. "I assume that's a compliment, coming from you. I meant the same, more or less. You're… well, you aren't like the rest, either. You aren't like the other Hunters. I did not quite see it at first because you are as bloodthirsty as they come, but you let me live that night. You did not attack me at the lantern. And you did not chase me when I left." She pauses to remove the final stocking, and does so with a troubled look. "In fact, you just looked at me like I was some sort of… oddity you stumbled upon by happenstance."

Jamison desperately digs to find his voice again. It seems to be firmly entrenched inside of him, too deep for burial, a cracked and breaking artifact from an age long past. When he finally dredges it up, it's covered in silt and dust and mud, a curled and grungy thing: "You're not wrong," and he hates that it sounds that way because he can't remember the last time he felt so suffocated, so nervous, so choked that words couldn't climb out of him. The eve of his first Hunt might contend, but even then, even on that harrowing night, he talked and talked like the slats of his ribs let all his jittery thoughts loose with nothing to cage them back, and it was Mako who told him with a fierce, gravelly undertone to shut his trap or the beasts would swarm him like bloatflies to a rotting corpse.

Satya looks at him then, her mouth pressed thin in thought, the glitter of her eyes like fresh tinder sparked by firelight. Black stockings rest in the crook of her arm, the ends drawn out and smoothed, the anklet held by its gemstone between a thumb and forefinger. Only two items remain: the gold filigreed corset and a silken black undergarment.

"You are quite the oddity yourself," she says, quieter than before; a harmony with the hungry fire. "Did you know that?"

He clears his throat to jostle the tomb mold from the back of his mouth. Everything has a tacky, desiccated feel. The storm might have drenched him, but he could vomit sand.

"Had an idea, yeah. Yharnam don't treat outsiders too well, in case that might've slipped you by. Not too many crippled Hunters running about, either. Well, not with shiny works like these, at any rate." He flexes his hand at her, silver fingers bending and curling as the hinges are tested to their full extent. "One of a kind, this one. Won't find another like it. The leg, neither. Custom built!"

"You know that isn't what I meant. Being an outsider doesn't make you an oddity per se, and neither do your choice of prosthetics." The anklet moves like liquid in her hand as she idly toys with the chain. "I happen to be minus an arm as well, if you cared to notice. I'm certain that alone isn't what made me stand out to you."

Folding up his good leg, he lays his arm across his knee and rests his chin right over top. His adam's apple knots down in a hard swallow. He'd kill for something to drink right about now. Preferably a cocktail with a little more fire and a little less blood.

"I'm not blind," he says, metal fingers pathing down his lifelines. If the Dream had scooped him up, flesh would replace the Oto Workshop's pristine craftsmanship. "I know I stick out. Not just the way I talk or fight or whatever else, but all of me. I wear their clothes and hats, use their guns and blood and greet 'em with their bloody customs, but they still know I ain't like the rest of them. Outsiders's always easy pickings. And it's not like all the others go about giving in to the Old Blood, either. Not that anybody knows that."

"I do," she says.

Jamison pauses to look at her, a taut thread of apprehension stitching into the chambers of his heart, and she meets his gaze with stern yet cautious challenge, as if the great blond wolf stalking the Hunt bore through his eyes and stared right back.

"All right, all right, okay, I get it," he says. "I'm no usual Hunter and I'm no Yharnamite. But what I don't get is what the hell you meant by smell. I smell different? What's that supposed to mean? How'm I supposed to smell?"

She gives a halfhearted shrug. "I don't know how to describe it. All Hunters have a strange scent. It's the first thing you notice, regardless of all other defining characteristics. Even if you never see their weaponry or their attire in a crowd, you can still tell there's one nearby. When I think of a Hunter, I always think of that smell."

Slowly, Satya starts to tend to the crystal teardrop earrings hanging from her ears. The golden tipped metal of her fingers coaxes out each one with a gentle diligence, and then collects them into the flat of her palm with the anklet.

"You seem to have… well, I'm not sure, exactly. It's a scent, yes, but it isn't like the others. Theirs is this sort of sour smell. It isn't quite like beasts or blood or sweat. It's something else altogether. Pungent and hot, like ash, but somehow… off, I think. I can't explain it. It's that other scent you get with a slow rot, like the body trying to reject a poison."

With the three crimson drops in her hand, she starts toward the table where Jamison's pouches and gear lie splayed across its surface. Her bare feet glide across the floorboards, heel-to-toe, heel-to-toe, capturing a dignified grace that Yharnam's nobility seems to have forgotten. Carefully, she sets the three pieces of jewelry down beside the ragged leather of his repeater's holster, followed shortly by her stockings, and gives them a long and musing look.

"There is that hot ashen smell, yes, but there is something sweet to you. It isn't the smell I think of when I see a Hunter. Not quite. That's why you caught me off guard in the Woods. Under normal circumstances, I can sense them coming, the smell always gives it away, but yours is something different. Something… odd. Unique. It sets you apart from your brethren, and at the time, it made me question you and your motives entirely."

Pausing at the table's smoothed wooden edge, her fingers tap at her metal knuckles with delicate precision, clinking over the soft susurrus of the rain. Despite her attention fixed upon the dripping bouquet of damp clothes sagging over the nearby chair, she doesn't appear to be looking at them directly; whatever imagery paints her mind's eye has enticed her interest to a world beyond the mundane.

"It isn't unpleasant," she then adds, after a moment of thought. "I prefer it, in fact."

Mystified, Jamison gives his inner arm a light sniff. All that pulls through is the heavy smell of perspiration, wet rainwater, smoking wood, damp gunpowder, and the underlying aroma of old leather. Whatever it is she's talking about, it isn't something he can discern. After all, he doesn't need to rely on smells to identify another Hunter; simply presence and the soft chime of bells are more than enough.

"Right. Okay. So, what're you getting at? Is this some kind of compliment or something?" As he shifts his weight onto his leg to lift himself off the floor, he forces down another swallow; courage is a far scarcer thing outside the realm of the Hunt. "Or is this just one of those 'getting friendly' talks?"

"I don't really know. You felt the need to tell me I'm different than the others for some reason or another, didn't you?" She folds her arms beneath her breasts, crossing over the gold latticework of her corset, and pivots on her foot to face him. "I am only returning the favor, I suppose."

He scratches at his chin. "So what I'm hearing is I smell good."

"I did not say that," she says hastily.

"You said it 'isn't unpleasant.' Those're your exact words. Exact." Jamison offers her a crooked grin despite the knotted cluster of discomfort writhing underneath. "So that means it is pleasant, right?"

Satya bristles. "That is not what I meant."

"What'd you mean, then? If it ain't unpleasant, what is it?"

"I only meant…" She quiets, expression tight, eyes staring into the wooden floor as if it might split apart and swallow her whole. "I meant, considering my current situation with Cainhurst, you are one of the more tolerable companions I could have chosen. A common Yharnamite would have turned me over to the Church, and any one of the local stock of Hunters here would have slaughtered me on sight. If you had been anyone else that night, I never would have survived the Hunt."

She affords a slight glance in his direction. Bereft of the aurum trappings ornamenting her hair and the ruby studded jewelry adorning her neck, ankle, and ears, she seems somehow smaller, less intimidating, as if bangles and gems alone had given her the façade of something superior and untouchable, something beyond what Yharnam could ever hope to muster.

"And," she says, "if by some miraculous feat, my hypothetical not-you Hunter companion decided to spare me just as you did, I would have to suffer that awful smell."

"So I do smell good, then." He shrugs, nonchalant, belying the erratic heartbeat drumming beneath his breastbone. "Bloody lucky I found you, yeah?"

"Lucky for me, or lucky for you? I know I benefit from this arrangement, considering I come through each Hunt unscathed, but there must be something in it for you. Hunters are known for their ruthlessness and butchery. I doubt you would have let me live if there weren't some ulterior motive or some sort of advantage to be gained." Damp black strands frame high cheekbones and cuts of tiger's eye as she appraises him. "Unless you truly are different than the rest."

"Well, said yourself I'm an oddity, right? Just some outsider who don't know any better. Being different ain't a surprise." He curls back his lip in a displeased grimace. "Is it really that important? 'Sides, I already told you you're not like the rest of all those mindless beasties, sprouting fur and fangs and getting all bug-eyed, y'know, turning on each other and going about goring the others in the middle of the night. Thoughts start going long before the fur crops up, and you don't have any of that, so—I don't know, why bother offing you? Seems a waste."

Satya entertains a wry smile, gentle and glittering as if forged from sheets of stained glass. "Considering your position under the Healing Church, I find it very strange that a Hunter is asking me that question. Surely you know your history?"

"I know enough," he says, scowling at the floor. He can't make himself look at her; her presence holds a stiff and palpable weight, her eyes two sparks of candlelight, the distant promise of a lit lantern deep in the swallowing dark.

"The Healing Church promotes the purge of beasts. Something about plunging one's hand in to rip out the cancer that's taken root in Yharnam, if I remember the pious tripe from those Churchmen." She laces her hands together, expectant, the white of her fangs stark by the rich color of her lip. "Hunters were chosen to cleanse. They perform this sacred duty through the Hunt. A whole sect of the Church has devoted itself to this ritual, and even smaller sects have splintered from the first. Your Powder Kegs, for instance." She crooks one finger at him in acknowledgement. "I am not naïve, Mister Fawkes. Something that night must have convinced you I wasn't worth killing, or I wouldn't be here. I want to know why."

Well, she is most certainly blunt. Better than dancing around it all this time, he supposes. If he must be honest, this whole sequence of events concerning her company has been by far one of the stranger things he's managed. Between blood drunk nights filled with the Hunt and bearing the bleary mornings after, befriending a witty Vileblood hadn't exactly been in the scope of things. Sparing her hadn't been, either, but something came to a churning halt inside of him when he'd glimpsed gold beyond the pale, flickering wreaths of the lantern.

Jamison clenches his right fist, metallic fingers crunching in on one another. The Oto Workshop would skin him if they knew. Mako would probably smash his head against a wall for being such a bloody curious bastard, and the Executioners would march at dawn.

With a corded knot in the hollow of his throat, he approaches the table and digs into the damp depths of his coat pocket to retrieve the moonstone. He turns it over in his palm, the pearlescent surface resembling a lit cinder in the light of the hearth. If he truly wanted, he could sew it into one of his weapons so it might lend its strength to him on the eve of a Hunt, but it continues to hide in pouches and pockets and in the callused valley of his palm, a sacred relic rather bound to flesh than metal.

"You wanna know? All right. Sure." The moonstone stays poised between his thumb and forefinger; a channel, a charm, a focus; something tangible to keep him chained to the earth above when the Dream drags him deep. "No matter what happened with the Vileblood and all them nobles at Cainhurst—whatever kind of rituals, customs, blasphemies of the Church, doesn't matter—you're something else. You're their stock, all right, I know that, but you got that sort of… I dunno. Don't know how to explain it. It's just like I said. Different, yeah? The rest of them ain't nowhere close. You're like one of us."

"I find I'm the furthest from the type," she says. "And I believe your Church would be in agreement."

"Oi, not my Church," he says with a lick of fire on his tongue. "And I don't mean you're like them, you know, not the Choir or the Church Hunters, not those religious ratbags, but you got that… well, you got that ferocity in you. It was there when we met, I felt it, and that weren't no posh meeting, neither; we got good and bloody and had every thought to kill 'til that beast showed up. Always get so stripped down during the Hunt, don't need pleasantries or any of that, so it's like all your manners get stuffed and you're left with whatever monster's breathing underneath it all."

She stands there, expressionless, her composure cobbled from slabs of sleek marble. The zeniths of her cheeks look somehow burnished, as if someone had brushed her warm skin with liquid gold.

"While that may be so," she says, one eyebrow perked, "I fail to see how your claim is possible. If we are all stripped down to our basest instincts in these Hunts, no formalities or manners or anything remotely human, what exactly sets me apart from the rest of those you've slain?"

"Well, no common wolfbeast would be standing here arguing with me, now, would she? Reckon the floor'd be painted with my throat by now. Probably make all me innards outards, too."

And it's true, he thinks, a laugh dying in the back of his mouth; the first beast he'd ever seen was a transformed mat of hair and fangs standing over the drenched corpse of her husband. Mako had brought him there to show what damage beasthood could render, and as someone too in between man and boy and with the Hunter's Mark still a few years yet away, all Jamison could do was stand and watch the wolfen monster prowl the floorboards and gnaw at the man's bones.

"Point is," he says, engulfing the stone into his palm as if it could entrench the memories back into the tomb from whence they came, "even with how that night went, that big slobbering bastard and me bleeding out in that forest, you still went back. You knew what I was, you knew, but you still waited for me at that lantern. All reverted from before, y'know, civil again, like morning's come and the night's all been a dream."

"Dreams are rarely so lucid," she says.

"Yours, maybe." Intently avoiding her gaze, he gives the moonstone a delicate toss into the air before catching it with his prosthetic hand. It makes a soft clink against the metal. "You still got that fire to you, same as that night, but it's all under wraps now that civilized company's about. Just like the rest of us."

"You think I'm a Hunter." Her piqued tone conveys incredulity.

"Nah, not a Hunter. You don't hunt. That's plain. But you don't have to be a Hunter to be like one. Your Knights, they're not Hunters, but they crawl about clearing Cainhurst's streets of the 'impure' like the Hunters from the Healing Church, right? Reckon if Old Yharnam was your home, you'd've been conscripted by the Old Hunters, maybe torched the place with the rest of 'em." He captures the moonstone in his hand again, and then holds it up over his eye. "You got that mettle in you, the sort all Hunters need. I know it when I see it. Hard not to when that lot's the company you keep. And cross me heart, I saw it that night. It was beautiful."

The corner of her mouth threatens a smile, sharp and purposeful. "I see. Kindred spirits, then. Strange, considering the circumstances. An outcast noble from Cainhurst, stripped of her house and name and assets, and an outsider turned Hunter in the glorious name of the Healing Church. I don't know whether I should be offended or not."

"Not," he says, and with emphasis. "It weren't meant as an insult, all right? I learnt better. I did. All the rest of them made sure of it. Most Hunters like seeing themselves in posh dress and pretty language 'cause they like thinking it keeps civility around."

"So I've noticed." She turns back to the fireplace, one hand curling at her back to give the crossed laces from her corset a testing tug. "So, if I understand this correctly, we separate ourselves from beasthood with all of these guises, top hats and canes and tailored clothing, but it's nothing in the end. The Hunt brings it out, regardless of whether it's wanted. We simply hide it better when morning comes."

He gives a passive nod. "Well, yeah, that's the gist of it, innit? That's why you see Hunters go mad. Before, a turning Hunter might die during a Hunt, and that'd be the last you see of 'em 'til their body went up in flames. But dying's not part of it now. Not in the true sense, anyway. So you got Hunters living longer than they should, living through all the gutting and slaughtering, waking up from the Dream like death never touched 'em, and they keep bloody going. Then maybe after a while killing beasts ain't so satisfying anymore. Maybe the Hunt don't come around enough. Then you got Hunters going real blood drunk—sort of, I dunno, regressing—so they go about whacking those who aren't sick. Lines blurring, y'know, where you can't tell what's got fur and what doesn't."

"Do you have that problem, dear Hunter?" Pulling one lace from the corset's knot, she faces him with an accusing look, as if she half expected him to turn on the spot.

Jamison forces down a thick swallow. "No. Well, not yet."

"Not yet? So, is that your fate, then?" She draws down the other lace, and the knot dissolves. "Seeing beasts where there are none?"

"Might be. Don't know, really." He wrenches his attention away from her slender hands and the black threads and stares intently at the charred brick lining the hearth. "Hoping not, anyway. Not too keen on the idea. Going all blood addled means no more dreaming."

"And no lucidity, either."

"Probably not. Still, even if I did go proper blood drunk, don't think it'd be much of a problem for you. All you gotta do is leave me to the others. The Kegs'll end it right."

"I will end it."

He chokes. "What?"

"I will end it," she repeats. "It's the least I could do, really, considering everything that's happened. A sort of repayment for your services, I suppose." One by one, she pulls the pairs of crossed laces loose. "You saved me from both yourself and a bloodthirsty brute who thought us easy prey. If you happened to… regress, as you so put it, killing you would only be doing the same. A small kindness for what you've done."

"I don't rightly think I'd call that a kindness," he says.

Pausing, she looks over her shoulder. "And what would you care to call it?"

Moonstone back between his callused fingers, he scratches at his hairline as his gaze drifts away from the flames. Fire laps at her like hungry seafoam cresting the broken shore, collapsing at the edges of her skin and leaving soft streaks of lingering cinder to burn and smoke and smoulder; the smashed coals from upturned braziers and smeared cloth wet with oil on a hot summer night where blood runs into the cracked spaces among old stones. The shape of her haloed in embers drags a heavy draught of adrenaline, heady and hot down under his sternum, and while a part of him knows he should look away, the rest of him pays it little heed.

"Well, I'd call it fair," he says, voice turned muck and gravel. "I tried to kill you, right? S'only fair if you have a go. Wouldn't be any fun otherwise."

The laces let the corset pull free. One arm crooked before her, she holds it flush, pressed neatly against her breasts. "I would have the upper hand, then, just as you did."

"Right. Yeah, yeah, you would. Far as I know, Hunters don't notice themselves going addled, so reckon first strike's all yours." His tongue feels too thick. "Lucky you!"

"Lucky me, indeed. I am curious, however—how exactly do you kill something that has the essence of a beast and the skin of a human?"

"Good question," he says, smoothing smudged fingerprints over the moonstone's face. "The heart, I think. I suppose it's as good a place as any. Things usually stop living when you poke 'em clean through a time or two. They don't like fire much, either. But I don't know so much about Hunters. The ones who're gone, that is. Could be different than the rest 'cause you need that mettle, right. I never killed another Hunter."

Not yet, at least.

"I see. Well, I'll be sure to keep that in mind." Whether she's impressed or not, he can't tell; his focus lies on her arms crossed over the fields of intricate filigree, as if to somehow further conceal the dark flecks and freckles beneath from his prying eyes. "You're most likely right, though. After all, hearts tend to be bothersome beasts of their own accord. Perhaps that would be a stroke of good fortune for you."

Jamison slides warm quicksilver over his mouth and tears himself away from her and the radiating heat of the hearth. The same beastly beat locked under his ribs has risen from a gentle knock to a harrowing slam; a monster all on its own, howling with untiring lungs for something it cannot have.

"Bloody oath it would," he mutters, and turns toward the featherbed.

Tucking the moonstone safely in his trouser pocket with one hand, he knots his other into the white linen sheet and wrenches it off the mattress. He doesn't bother to meet her gaze when he crosses the room and offers it upon his outstretched arm; he knows how she is, how she carries herself, how she looks down her nose at the thought of a Hunter, regardless of allegiance; he knows he's too weak-willed to face her as she is.

Pressure curls around his forearm as she gives the sheet a testing tug. "For modesty, I assume. Correct?"

He loosens his grip and gives it a curt shake in her direction, a silent request for her to hurry up and take the bloody thing or else he's like to throw it.

"Well, if this's gonna be a regular—uh, thing, y'know, the two of us coming back here after a Hunt—don't want you feeling… well, you ain't used to this, are you? Shonky pubs down the district with ramshackle rooms. Rowdy wankers downstairs. Sleeping near strangers on account of storms." Setting his jaw, he runs his tongue behind his teeth. "Right, I just don't want you going crook on me or anything 'cause of delicate sensibilities, all right? So, yeah, sure. Modesty. Whatever you wanna call it. Fine by me."

To punctuate his meaning, he gives the sheet another impatient shake.

Satya enfolds the linen in her arms. It drapes down the front of her body in a pristine waterfall and pools on the floorboards by her feet. Half scooped and flush with her skin, it frames the loose corset and the slender lines of her clavicle.

"I see," she says. "Well, whatever your intent, it's appreciated. This will do until everything is dry."

"No worries." He turns away, face hot, and leans himself against the wall by the hearth. "It's just a cover. Better than nothing, yeah?"

"Speaking of nothing, you gave me the only blanket. Don't you plan on sleeping here?"

"Well, not there," he says, emphasizing the bed with a roll of his shoulder. "Right by the fire's just fine for me."

"Mister Fawkes, your sudden exhibition of chivalry worries me."

"What?" He catches himself before looking over his shoulder. Nails clamped into his palm, he presses his temple against the stone wall and looks straight at the featherbed, at the plain sheet stretched overtop. "What're you talking about?"

"The man I met in the Woods wouldn't be splitting hairs over blankets," she says. "I find it very strange how concerned you are about my 'delicate sensibilities' all of a sudden."

"It's not that," he says, and instantly wishes he hadn't.

"It isn't? Well, what is it, then?"

"It's—" Jamison mashes his palm over his mouth and breathes because his mind is tearing in twenty different directions at once and all of them are equally terrible; all arrays of things one absolutely should not do to a person not only of noble birth but also to a person marked traitor of the Church by heritage and kinsmen's actions alone, and despite the desperate amount of trouble he might be in for associating with her should anyone happen to find out, he absolutely cannot stop thinking about her.

Huffing a ragged breath between his teeth, Jamison digs his fist into the worn stone slab at his shoulder and reins himself steady. This is not how he'd imagined the morning after their fifth Hunt, or how he'd imagined the first Hunt where she did not retreat to the Woods after its end. In fact, this is not how he'd imagined any encounter of this caliber, although if he must be honest, he'd never quite thought that far ahead. People do not seek Hunters out for their company or for romantic gestures or even for carnal pleasure. If someone seeks a Hunter, it's because they want something dead—and Jamison is plenty used to that. He's even used to the baser urges the Old Blood instills and amplifies within him; violence and sex seem to be almost second nature.

However, harboring a Cainhurst fugitive who sports a penchant for the finer indulgences in life as well as a sharp curiosity in Yharnam's superior architecture has rendered him completely out of his element. The Kegs don't talk of internal politics or the petty squabbles between the houses of Cainhurst. They don't expect finery or etiquette or sanctuary, and they certainly don't consume his interest like this. Hunting has always ignited that telltale spark in the pit of his stomach, but she makes it shudder and writhe with a fervor he's never felt.

It's like the Old Blood. Almost. Every now and again, just like when the moon is a coin stamped into the settling ink of Yharnam's evening starscapes, he'll start to lose his grip on his sense of self, as if he's been jostled free from his body and is watching it lunge and sweat and slaver from a distance. The tight and fleeting high is still there, still present, still beating, still burrowed and deep and rushing to his temples, but it has this strange film over it as if he were experiencing it through the other side of a looking glass; the heady, sedative weight of an elixir, but the fiery pull of blood and victory.

And it's a bad thing. It is. All of it. Common sense, really. But that has never stopped him from doing anything before, now, has it?

"Mister Fawkes?" Satya's voice takes on a quiet, beckoning timbre.

"It's… different," he manages at last.

"A lot of things are different this morning, it seems."

"Yeah. Guess so." Jamison screws his eyes shut until white speckles fill the void. He can sense her movement shifting in his peripheral, and he dares not look. "Just not used to this, is all. You always hear that old saying, right, a Hunter is never alone, but after Hog stopped coming with me, I just kept going on me own. Sometimes we'd meet up again, sure, sometimes I'd hunt with a couple of the other Kegs for something big, but the rest of the time it's just been me. Having somebody around like this's just… different."

"But bearable, I hope." The floor creaks, marking her footsteps as she leaves the warmth of the hearth. The distinct rustling of fabric being laid upon what he assumes to be her clothing follows shortly afterward. "I feel somewhat the same. I'm not exactly used to the constant company, either. I was left well enough alone before the Vileblood made its way to Cainhurst. Time to myself is a luxury I've come to miss."

He chews at his inner lip. "I can go tell that smarmy bastard to give us another room, if you want. He'd probably listen. Maybe. Pistol might help with convincing if he's decided being bloody minded's better than doing his job."

"That won't be necessary. This will suffice. It's only for one night." A soft, chiming laugh accompanies the flap of the sheet somewhere in the center of the room. "Well, day, I suppose. I'm still not quite used to keeping this schedule. That makes two of us, doesn't it?"

Nodding in reply, he makes a vaguely affirmative noise in his throat. He still has half a mind to tromp down the stairs and demand a second room for his own sanity's sake. If he were alone, he could at least take care of the uncomfortable stiffness straining his trousers. Would she take offense if he simply walked out?

"Preoccupied, Hunter?"

Jamison jolts against the wall in surprise. As he glances upward, attention rapt, he grits down a mouthful of choice curses. Satya now stares at him from the edge of the bed, swathed in white with her jet hair lank and drying down her shoulders. The lamp on the nightstand bathes her in a muted yellow glow; warm shadows shape her jaws, her neck, her high cheekbones. With both hands folded in her lap and one leg crossed, she regards him with an amused stare.

Heat rushes to his face. "What?"

"You didn't respond," she says. "I assumed you were preoccupied with the floor's exquisite craftsmanship."

"No, all right, I'm just—"

Jamison rubs a metal hand down his cheek and bites the thick of his tongue, a strangled grunt of frustration coiled behind his teeth. Thinking about you would be a poor choice; unlike the more prim and proper of his brethren, he is not the most versed in various etiquettes, but he knows enough to realize such candidness is unwanted. Satya is blunt, yes, and although she entertains less of the useless social games enthused citizens on the other side of the wealth divide like to employ, none of it is an invitation to drag her into something like this.

"I'm just knackered, is all," he says. "Looks like it's all catching up. Been a long night, you know. Real long night."

"It has. It's just as you said, isn't it? Morning comes, and it's as if the whole night has been a dream." She gives a soft, thoughtful hum. "Still, I'm glad for the sun. Even if it doesn't always agree with me, I enjoy it nonetheless."

Absently, Jamison imagines her soaking in scintillating summer sunshine, garbed in gold from gown to garters. Sheer fabrics follow shortly afterward: silks, stockings, slip ons, scarves, all accented by the delicate frills and laces Cainhurst fashions seem to enjoy. Black and red velvets suit her well enough, but bathing in the sun's rich colors could eclipse the world entirely. She'd be draped in layers of spun gold, sitting among kempt gardens and the moonkissed faces of lumenflowers with a book in her lap, or she'd be among the dark, stony ramparts with a bloodblade wrought from her fingers, sweat sticking to her skin as she whips around to sever faux limbs from a training sandbag.

He shivers at the thought. The carnal beast in him salivates for the chance to spar against her again. Her expert swordsmanship could rival any Hunter's; each attack is executed with quick and deliberate precision, pinpointing his joints, his movements, his vulnerabilities, and his entirety crows for another chance. Clad in fine clothing or none at all, he's certain she could bring him to his knees with the curve of her blade at his throat. After all this time spent stalking down beasts and cracking them open onto the streets, the notion of someone overpowering him with a single deft maneuver leaves him hot and breathless.

Now uncomfortably hard, he lifts himself away from the wall and plods over in front of the hearth, his back turned to her. The fire still burns with eager vigor; the splintered wooden offerings have begun to split and char, their broken bark petrifying into molten husks among the slab of hot ashes. The heat reaches out with a crackling caress, and while a part of him wants to sprawl out on the floor and absorb all that he can in the wake of the raging storm, the rest of him keeps very still in the light of his current predicament, half hunched with his hands stuffed in his pockets.

When he can manage to herd his mind toward the bloodier aspects of the Hunt, it isn't so bad. Imagery of flesh hungry folk succumbing to beasthood is almost enough to lend him some relief. The problem, however, is that reality proves to be far more potent than whatever his imagination can muster. His eyes flick from the twisting ribbons of flame to where she sits expectantly, poised as if she were anticipating regal company, and then he must start over again.

Scratching at his neckline, Jamison grinds his molars and squints into the fire. Eventually he'll be able to sit. Or sleep. Sometime before nightfall, he hopes.

After several minutes of discomforting silence, he hears Satya rise from the featherbed. She takes two steps toward him, punctuated by the creaking floor. When curiosity becomes too much and he decides to snatch another glance in her direction, she takes a sudden pause mid-stride, as if she has somehow been caught doing something forbidden.

Jamison stares and tries to gulp down a breath, but his lungs seem to have forgotten how to function.

Whispers of rain still spot at her hands, her collarbone, her shoulders. Despite the heat from the fire, lingering droplets cling to her like rain against an intricate glass windowpane. Her dark hair waterfalls down both shoulders, combed haphazardly into rivers by slender fingers, clusters of wispy black ends curled by touch of the storm. Soft hazel flecks glitter in the bright gold of her eyes, an earthen flame; the light brought by both the oil lamp and the hearth seems to have breathed a hot, palpable interest into her gaze.

"I have a proposal for you, Hunter," she says. It isn't stated with her usual coolness or the sharp tones she saves for issuing commands in combat. Instead, it's gentle, soft-spoken, warm, a small treasure tucked into the crook of her neck.

It's so markedly different than anything he's heard that chills ripple up his arms. "A proposal?"

"I meant to address it earlier, but I wasn't sure what our accommodations would be. Walking down the street in the pouring rain is hardly the time or place to ask. But now that we're settled, out of the storm, and ready to turn in, I think the time is slightly more apt."

"Apt?" He feels like an absolute idiot, parroting choice words after her like one of those great frilly birds imported from only gods know where, but the ability to concentrate on anything but her seems to have left him quite suddenly.

"Well, yes. Apt. Unless you think differently?" She taps her fingernails along the back of her prosthetic fingers. "This is important. I wouldn't want to broach the subject with you otherwise. It's… well, let's put it this way: it isn't exactly something I'd trust with just anyone."

Jamison bites his lip and digs for the moonstone in his pocket. His trouble parsing the situation is twofold: no neutral object of focus, and a half-naked woman standing in the middle of the room. The latter surpasses the former by leagues.

"Why's this involving me all of a sudden?" he asks, gripping the stone in his fist. Its imprint lends him solace. "Said yourself Hunters ain't the trustworthy sort. You got the right idea, being wary. The Church likes acting all righteous, but all Hunters got some rot in 'em far underneath." He lifts the moonstone out of his pocket and lets its nacreous face mirror the flames. "I know I got rot in me. Leg's proof enough. Beasthood climbs up the right, don't it?"

"That is the saying I've heard, yes. Beasthood curses the right. An old Yharnam adage. Whether it is truthful or not, I wouldn't know." Palm enfolding her metal fingers, she eyes the glint of his quicksilver leg. "But that is beside the point. Regardless of your trustworthiness, I don't have much of a choice. So far, you've sheltered me and protected me from the Church. You've proven yourself enough. That will do for now."

"Sure. If you say so." With the mention of rot, whispers of pain thread from his phantom leg, and Jamison gauges whether he should sit or stand. His trousers remain uncomfortably tight, so he opts to stay where he is. "Right, so, what's this proposal about, then? You're making it sound so serious. More guard work?"

"No, not exactly. It's something else. I don't quite know how to word it." She pauses, her fingers flexing as if she were counting a series of imaginary letters. "I would like to modify our current situation."

Nonplussed, he picks through his brain. "So, what, the room? That's no trouble. Already told you I can go down and get us another one. No worries there. All I've gotta do is—"

"Not the room," she interjects.

"The, uh… well, the clothes?" He dares not look back to the chair where her dress and corset lie drying. "I mean, yeah, sure, a sheet's not ideal, but I don't mind you wearing mine or anything if you're—"

"Not the clothes, either," she says. "This is between the two of us."

"What's that supposed to mean? The two of… Wait, wait, wait. So you're talking about something aside from—" Unable to think of a good descriptor on the spot, he frustratedly motions between them both with the moonstone. "Well, whatever this is?"

Crinkles of amusement flank her eyes. "I categorize this as an acquaintanceship. Companions in the crudest sense."

"Sure, sure, whatever you wanna call it. Acquaintanceship. Right. So that's been a whole lot of hunting, hiding, keeping schedules, and nicking things from the 'Shop." He works his jaws and glances to the fireplace, following the dusty grout between the stonework. "We do enough as it is. I don't get it. What's there to change? It's fine as it is, innit?"

"It is fine, certainly. I won't argue that. You do make quite the capable hunting partner, and somehow an even better bodyguard. But this doesn't concern your abilities, at least in that regard." She takes one cautious step forward, the wood issuing a groan beneath her toes. "To put it simply, the root of the problem is that I'm out of… well, let's call it sustenance, shall we? That's fair, isn't it? The blood. The Old Blood. The very thing that keeps you here. I can sustain myself for a while—and I have, as you've seen—but that won't last. The rest of the supply I brought was used last night. I've found the Hunt is ruthless in that regard. It's unfortunate, of course, but not unsolvable."

Jamison looks over his shoulder. He narrows in on her face, trying his best to ignore the placement of the sheet tucked over her bust. "Right, I don't mind making fires or blasting some beast to hell and back, but I am not going back out in that storm. You saw how bad it was, right? Thunder's just started, and I reckon it's about to get worse. Not about to drown meself in the river for a single bloody vial."

She regards him with a wan smile. "I wouldn't ask that of you, Mister Fawkes. Really? Going back out in such unsightly weather? Do you really think me so demanding?"

He shoves the stone in his pocket again with a huff. "Well, if you're not wanting me out in that storm, what d'you want then?"

"It is a small request. I only ask this of you because I have no other options until we can move on." Satya lowers her head then, the back of her hand pressed against her lips. Rich, dark hair curtains her cheeks. "What I'm asking is… would you allow me to use you as a live source?"

"A what?" Rubbing his eyes—surely he misheard, surely—he bites at the inside of his cheek to sober himself. "What did you just call me?"

"A live source," she says. "Saves the trouble of bottling. And cuts out the middlemen, too, for whatever that's worth."

Jamison drags his hand down his face, over his mouth, and then settles his fingers securely around the thick of his neck. His adam's apple dips under his lifelines in a swallow. "Right. So, you wanna bite me. That's what this is."

"More or less?" Satya shrugs. "Obviously the incisions wouldn't be large by any means. Just enough to get what I need."

He squeezes. "And just how much are we talking here?"

"It depends."

"It depends?" he asks, incredulous.

"Well, it does," she says. "I certainly won't drain you dry, if that's what you're worried about."

"That ain't what I'm worried about!"

"Then what are you worried about if not for killing you?"

Jamison squints at her warily. "I mean, all right, I get it, you gotta drink, but isn't that a little… y'know…" He holds his metal hand out flat and gives it a wobbling shake. "… intimate?"

"Well, yes. I suppose it is. To a degree." She folds her arms, the brilliant red of her prosthesis catching liquid lamplight in its sheen. Shadows curl into the folds of the sheet, cutting bold lines by her neck, her clavicle, her jaws. "However, I'm not left with much choice. I would much rather have the impersonality of a vial, but that isn't available, and won't be for a while. Not until I can visit the Woods or until you could steal some from your Workshop or one of the surrounding clinics. I wouldn't dare go to the Church directly for a vial from them. I'd be given to the Choir or the other Church doctors if they so much as caught sight of me."

The very name of the Church's experimental hand makes him feel like there's the astringent tang of antiseptic filling the back of his mouth. "Even with your glamour? Thought that were enough. Lets you get by all right, don't it? Nobody's been none the wiser."

"So far. It works as well as it needs to, but I'd rather not take the chance." Satya skims a fang over a bare knuckle. "The rumors, you know."

"Right. Yeah. Collectors." He flicks his gaze back to the fire crackling in the hearth. "I know."

And he does. He learned long ago that the Hunt is not the only aspect of the Church's order of purification. Hunters cleanse the flourishing scourge while the Healing Church stalks the streets, listening for damning whispers. Churchmen clad in black walk Yharnam's alleyways at the cusp of dusk, lamps held out in one fist to let oil forge the way. To hear a knock on one's door past sunset is a curse of another kind: beasthood will dwell in that household whether the accused lies sick or well.

A moment or two of silence ticks by. A crash of thunder rumbles from outside, a wracking clatter across the roof. The stippling patterns on the windowpanes start to sluice and spread, summoning soft waterfalls over the glass. Jamison's heart pulses beneath his fingerprints as he tries to think of other things. He thinks of the Workshop, of stones and vials and the musty scent of parchment. He thinks of cobble pathways, damp mud, the heavy ambiance of rain. He thinks of tree roots, snaking and gnarled; of pocked gravestones and smoky torchlight; of thorns and underbrush and the distant churn of the windmill. He thinks of the river carving by the aqueducts and chasing sand to sea.

Jamison isn't one to run, but going for a swim doesn't sound like such a bad idea.

"So?" she prompts. "What is your answer?"

Rubbing his fingers down the sides of his neck again, he exhales noisily through his nose. "Well, that's a bit of a loaded question, innit? Not like I got anyone biting me on the regular. I mean, I already stick me leg when things start getting bad and I need a good breather, but that's just needles. I don't have a problem with those. They're just pointy metal sticks. Pointy metal sticks's one thing and somebody biting you's another."

"Really? I had you pegged for the sort who might enjoy it." Her eyes harbor a mischievous gleam. "Hunters do tend to succumb to their baser instincts, after all."

A flush of heat crawls up Jamison's cheeks. "Oi, all right, I wasn't finished!"

Her eyebrows arch in surprise. "Weren't you? Well, go on."

"I was saying," he says, mustering a scowl, "I'm not really keen on it 'cause it's just not something that happens, all right? I mean, okay, right, I been bit by a lot of things, that's true, died from a lot of things, had beasts chasing with big sets of chompers ready to take off me other arm, but this is… this ain't like any of those. I'm not some Blood Saint. I don't get roped up and have 'em drain me for distributing or anything. Got better things to do than sit around clinics waiting for a needle."

"I am not asking you to be a Blood Saint," she says. "I am not asking you to drop your mantle and submit yourself to the Choir, either. I'm only asking for your assistance. You seemed to have no qualms about protecting me from that creature when we met. You also don't seem to mind harboring a Vileblood in Yharnam, a crime for which you are solely responsible. Is this really so different?"

"Yeah," he says. "This's got strings attached. I can feel it."

She releases a tired sigh between her teeth. "Mister Fawkes, our acquaintanceship already has strings attached. This isn't exactly simple, you know. Neither of us have had pristine behavior. In case you need reminding, not only did you smuggle me into a city where I would normally be slaughtered on sight, you also provided me with supplies and shelter to keep me here. The both of us are equally culpable, whether you like it or not."

"I know, I know, all right? I know. You don't have to remind me."

Slowly, Jamison lets go of his neck and starts to pace. The heavy quicksilver of his right leg thumps against groaning floorboards. He tries to avoid her stare, but he can feel its weight as it drags its talons down his shoulder blades and pinions to the curve of his back. Aside from the heavy cracks of thunder splitting from outside, she is the only thing he can seem to focus on.

And it's not a good focus, either. It's not the kind that helps him settle or sleep. It's not like the moonstone where he can roll it around in his hand to keep his thoughts on track. Thinking of her feels like something hollowed out the blood in his veins and poured thick oil in its stead, and now a flame has been lit at the apex of his spine and it threatens to engulf each delicate branch of inner webbing until he's a charred and smoking husk with coals for lungs, each inhale igniting like the burst of a bright and distant star.

If he agrees, if he lets her bite and drink from him, it would be an intimate affair by her own admission. There would be no pretense of impersonality; she'd take him by the wrist or the neck, two of many places most easily bled, and she would drain him like she'd drain a vial of the Old Blood, sharing in his strength and sustenance and drawing from the well that pumps from his heart. He has no qualms about cutting out the Saints and the Choir from the ritual, but if she does accept his blood, then what does that mean? That their 'acquaintanceship,' as she called it—companions in the crudest sense—might become something else?

As he paths past the table a second time, his phantom hand starts to itch. The urge to trace down her ribs and hipbones leaves him with a ladder of shivers tightening down his shoulder blades. He coils his prosthetic fingers into a quicksilver fist, as if that might somehow banish the thought of her pressed against him with her weight balanced in his lap, but it doesn't.

"Mister Fawkes." The impatience in her tone is hard to miss.

Shutting his eyes, Jamison breathes a heavy sigh of resignation. She's right, of course: their relationship is already complicated, and he is at fault. He never should have brought her to Yharnam. At the time, the pleasure of the forbidden was more tantalizing than the punishment. He hadn't bothered to give the entirety of the situation a second thought. All that mattered was that an exceptionally skilled woman with the curse of the Vileblood was in his debt, and he meant to bring her hunting. Thrill was the deciding factor then: it proved he could defy the rules of the Church and do whatever he wanted, consequences be damned.

Although, if he must be honest, thrill is still a deciding factor. Boredom doesn't exactly sit well with him. Why bother wasting time with the tedious and tiresome when he could have a blast trying something else?

Jamison pivots on his heel, crosses the room, and plants himself in front of her. Perhaps it's because he's never truly taken the time to notice, but it occurs to him now, watching her assess him with a guarded look, that the top of her head barely reaches the top of his sternum. He's got a good head or two on her, in fact, and he's not sure how such an obvious thing managed to miss him before. It must be her shoes, her clothing, he thinks; she's always seemed so rich, so regal in her elegant fineries, and somehow so much taller than the naked woman that stands before him now.

"All right," he says, finality in his voice. "You wanna bite me? Fine. You can bite me. But I got conditions."

Satya regards him with a wary eye. "Which are?"

"Right, right, okay. One." He holds up a metal finger. "You got five minutes. That's all. Not sitting here for yonks 'til you make me a bloodless skin flap or anything. I'm not in the mind to become one of them bloodstarved bastards. All right? All right. Two." He holds up another. "You can't off me. Just 'cause I dream don't mean I like carking it. Got a feeling dying this way's somehow worse than getting me lower half bitten clean off, so if you're taking litres of the stuff, you'd best leave me with a few. If I conk out and come to in that misty place again 'cause you were on my neck, you best believe I'll be coming back for you." He flexes all five fingers together at her. "Right, so, again, conditions: that's five minutes, no killing, drink whatever you need, done. All right?"

Entertaining a faint smile, she gives a nod of affirmation. "That sounds fair enough. I had no intent on taking particularly long—or killing you, for that matter—but if established boundaries make you feel more comfortable, that won't be a problem."

"And that five minutes's part of the biting, too," he adds. "So that's five minutes, you make whatever marks, no killing, drink whatever, finished, done. That's it. That's the end of it."

"That's the end of it," she says. "Very well. Agreed."

Jamison hadn't quite expected her compliance to come so easily. He glances behind her to the featherbed, the top sheet wrinkled and creased where she'd been, and the reality of the situation settles in. A nervous prickling starts to burrow through his chest.

Unnerved, he stretches a protective hand over the juncture of his neck and collarbone. "So, uh… how're we gonna do this? Did you want me at the table, or…"

"With your height, I think it would be better if you sit. I don't feel like standing on top of anything just to reach." Satya takes a swift step past him toward the chair tucked closest to the fire, the folds of her discarded clothing draped over its back. "And that way, if you happen to feel faint, you'll be well prepared."

While that does make sense, he'll admit, he is not entirely sold on the concept of being face-to-face. He isn't afraid—well, not in the usual sense of being afraid—but the idea of willingly putting himself in such a precarious position sits rather lopsided at the pit of his stomach. It might be dread if his body weren't strung so taut, ready to welcome any touch of hers with pleased groans and involuntary shivers.

Satya gestures to the chair at her side with a sharp incline of her head. He approaches at her unspoken command, swallowed words lining the sides of his throat like pins. The fire reaches out for him as he lowers himself into a sit near the hearth, the shredded red ribbons consuming ash and soot and dust from the blocks of charred firewood. Its heat reminds him of the heaviness of a steaming blanket laid over a sickbed: comforting once, but overwhelming now.

"This will hurt," she says.

"I know, I know. I've been through worse." Jamison's heart pounds in rapid clusters of gatling gun shots. He squares his shoulders and leans his neck to the side, exposing ample surface to work; a silent offering. "Little bite's not so bad, really."

That is what he's going to tell himself, anyway.

She nods—almost reassuringly, he finds—and edges his thighs apart with her hips. A warm hand coasts on the broad plane of his left shoulder and squeezes there, as if to offer some sort of condolence for her need, and it instills a drip of stilling shock in his veins because he can't ever remember her touching him without some semblance of clothing between them both: greatcoats, gloves, waistcoats, shirts, or sheets at the very least—and while he knows that shouldn't be one of the primary things he ought to be thinking about at this very moment, her skin is so warm and inviting and so very bare, and it's all his mind can seem to focus on.

"You are too tense." He can feel her eyes following the line of his clavicle and the space beneath his jaw, his adam's apple, his ear. "Relax, Hunter. You must. It won't be long, I promise."

If he could relax, he thinks, he most certainly would, but relaxing is impossible. His entirety is wound too tight, like a tourniquet cinched to staunch the bleeding. He has nothing to compare this to; if it were combat, he'd be loose, fluid, aggressive, wild, but combat is an environment in which he has complete and total control, and this is not. He'd like to say he could get up and walk away at a moment's notice, that he really doesn't want to partake in any of this, but he'd be lying if he did—and Jamison is a very poor liar.

Molten gold lingers on him as she takes one final step closer. The soft glitter of Satya's eyes catches in the firelight, a mesmerizing amalgam of hazel, topaz, and tiger's eye, and it vanishes behind dark lashes when her mouth lowers to his skin.

His spine snaps straight under the wet warmth of her tongue. Her lips single out a soft place on his throat, just to the side behind a prominent pipe of muscle, and a tremble traipses down his back at the heat of her breath by his hairline. Fire has singed him more times than he can count; he's been touched by torches and chuckaways and burst urns of flaming oil, but the fire earthed within her skin somehow surpasses it all.

Hands fiercely gripping his thighs, Jamison forces down a swallow and lets her sink her nails into the plateau of his shoulder. He leans into Satya's grasp as she ushers him closer with firm fingers, a pleased noise caged in his lungs. There are no teeth, he realizes, at least not yet. This is something of a prelude, primal and secret, something she might do with a lover would circumstances have permitted it, and while it might be wrong of him, he takes a visceral, private pleasure in how good it feels to have the heat of her body tucked so close.

When Satya bites down, it isn't like dying. It isn't like a wolfen monstrosity clamping its jaws over his arm, but it also isn't like the short and fleeting pain he'd anticipated. It's sharp, jarring, like the familiar jab of a syringe, but instead of a quick inject-and-release, it's a too-long needle lodged in a stretch of muscle. A painful throb centers at the side of his neck where her teeth have plunged—her tongue flattens between the punctures, welcoming his offering with avarice—but it soon dwindles into a dull ache, ebbing and flowing with the thrum of his heartbeat.

No, it isn't like dying, Jamison decides. His descent into the Dream has always been born of blood and violence and splintering pain: throat torn open, arms detached, an axe hacked through his gut, claws scoring his eyes, his mouth a goblet of dark and watery red. Nothing has ever killed him with a gesture so tranquil and intimate. It isn't like dying at all. It would never be with such tenderness.

The urge to touch her carves through him with abandon—and before he can stop himself, he reaches out for her hips.

As he frames his fingers over the sheet, the warmth of her body seeps through the fabric and into the crooked lifelines of Jamison's palm. He coaxes her closer with a firm squeeze, his thumbs angled over her hipbones, and Satya replies with a soft groan against his neck. Sharp, unfettered thrill spikes through him, enfolding him in a heady haze. It's the same fleeting high that pools in his veins when he's had three too many, when the impending adrenaline of combat consumes him too quickly; he's always left raw and trembling and with a pulse pumping like pistons.

This is like being blood drunk, he thinks. This is what it's like to hunt. This is what it's like to have a night on the town with her, to cleave the streets and to bathe in the aftermath. No matter how many times he's died, no matter how many ends he's met, nothing has ever compared to the pleasure of hunting with her. Even if he died by her hand, he's sure it would be far better than anything Yharnam's stock could hope to give.

A guttural noise escapes him at the thought, fuck, and he leans into her on impulse alone. Her skin smells of spice and wine and blood and rain and everything his consciousness can attribute to class and royalty; it suffuses his senses and intoxicates him in a way bloodshed never could. Carnality demands he pull her closer to let his mouth path down her shoulder, her collarbone, her sternum, her breasts, but restraint cords his arm and he tightens his grip along her hips instead.

Satya continues to drink at his neck, unperturbed. If she is discomforted at all by the situation, she gives no obvious tell: her posture remains straight, her lips still suck at his skin, and her tongue still laves at the blood from his incisions. One hand lingers on his left shoulder, her polished nails pressing thin crescents across planes of scattered birthmarks, while the other seems to have… migrated? He struggles to think, hacking through the brain fog—hadn't it been elsewhere? Somewhere not his side?

Jamison sucks in a jagged breath between his teeth as her prosthesis sketches a light path from his belt, up his ribs, over his pectoral, and to the black Hunter's Mark inked upon his right bicep. At any other time, in any other place, he might chalk it up to idle hands or passive curiosity, but with her body wedged between his thighs and the sheet loosening at her bust and her mouth on his neck, it only makes his trousers that much tighter.

"You doing that on purpose?" he asks, increasing the pressure of his left thumb upon her hip.

Her answer consists not of words, but of sleek metal fingers tracing from the Mark across the length of his shoulder. They settle upon the opposite side of his throat, her index finger placed just by his ear. Slowly, her tongue glides over where her teeth have punctured, as if to somehow apologize for either the erection or the inconvenience, and then her lips close over to drink the rest of his offering. Pain pricks a second time at his neck.

Wincing, jaws clenched, Jamison breathes a low hiss. While it isn't at all like getting gutted or gouged or severed or doused in oil and lit aflame, it still hurts more than he would care to admit. It isn't a mouthful of serrated teeth, but two honed fangs clamping over the sensitive spot by his jugular might as well be. He isn't sure what he expected; she did say it would hurt, after all.

As the ache throbs in his throat, he tries to remember if he'd managed to squirrel away a spare syringe in one of the night stand's drawers. He's visited the Flagon more times than he can count and he might have stashed a few away for safekeeping after a difficult night, but his memories are blurred and hazy and his racing heartbeat contributes absolutely nothing useful. Perhaps it's because he's been so spoiled by the Kegs' relationship with the Church, but he never seems to recognize his complete dependence on the Old Blood's restorative properties until his supply runs dry.

She must feel the same, he realizes, easing his hold on her hips. She must. The Vileblood makes her need, and she doesn't dream like his kin. She must rely on Old Blood just as much as he does, if not more. Why else would she be here?

At last, Satya releases him. Her tongue licks one final stroke across the twin incisions in his neck, as if to savor the taste, and she then draws back in a cautious measure. Her mouth is bright and wet and red; blood draws down her chin in an uneven thread, gliding past the small birthmark by her lower lip. Her skin shines in the flicking firelight with sweat, with rain, her fangs bared in sanguine.

If he weren't hard already, he most certainly would be now.

"You are not a Blood Saint." Her hands drop from his throat, his shoulders, his arms, and find purchase on his thighs. She squeezes him there as the ethereal gold of her eyes captures him in a vise. "You are not a Blood Saint," she says again, but with a firmness that suggests the mantra is to convince herself of the fact.

Jamison scrunches his nose up in distaste. "Bloody oath I'm not. Can you imagine me all roped up in some clinic?"

"No." A beat or two of silence ticks by. "If you were, I might not leave."

"Fat chance of that. The Choir thinks Hunters' blood's not good enough. Something about getting too tainted or too mixed or something. Don't bother me any." He offers a shrug and lets go of her, ignoring the lingering sting from her bite. "Not sure what makes the Saints any different, but I'm bloody glad I don't have them Choir deadheads breathing down me neck."

"No, you don't," she says, "but you do have me."

His heartbeat pulses almost painfully. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Satya crooks her head to the side, her expression shaped by bewilderment. "You are not a Blood Saint."

"No?" he manages, far too focused on the pressure of her fingers squeezing up his thighs.

"You are not a Blood Saint," she repeats, but somewhat softer than before; a reminder.

"No, still not, and never will be. The whole incompatibility deal? Pretty sure we went over that. Not even my head's that bad."

"I don't understand."

"You don't understand? I don't have any idea what you're—"

"But you're not a Blood Saint," she says, and without warning, both of her hands whip up to frame his jaws, clamping tight. Even if he wanted to look away, he couldn't; her grip keeps him immobile. Locked in, she stares at him with an intensity he can only ascribe to hunger.

Jamison struggles to parse the situation, but his attention has been consumed by other things. The curve of her hips keeps his thighs apart, the exhilarating warmth of her body radiating through the cloth of his trousers, and she's positioned herself dangerously close. If she hasn't noticed his current predicament, it won't be long before she does. The sensible part of him tells him to push her away—because, really, this is bad, very bad, and not at all like the companionship she'd described; and if she is somehow incapable of keeping boundaries then it absolutely must fall on his shoulders because he is her hunting partner and her bodyguard and there must be a voice of fucking reason somewhere—but the rest of him is unapologetically deaf and crows for contact in any way he can get it, and if that is her grabbing his face and stating he isn't a bloody Saint over and over again, then he is content enough to let it happen.

"I can't believe this," she says, index fingers lining his cheekbones. "I cannot believe this."

He meets her fierce gaze with a wary squint. "Did I miss something? Got a feeling I lost a bit of blood there, but I really don't get—"

"Be quiet. Did you know about this?" Satya takes the pad of her pinky finger and swipes it over his incisions, showing him a damp red fingerprint under the shifting light of the hearth.

"Did I know about what? That I bleed if I get bit? Didn't rightly think that needed disclosing," he says.

"Don't play dim with me, Mister Fawkes. That is not what I'm talking about. I am talking about this." She opens her mouth, fangs prominent and glistening with blood and saliva, and licks the tip of her finger with the flat of her tongue. "Did you know about it?"

Jamison finds it increasingly difficult to pay attention to anything other than her lips. "Right, look, I don't really—"

"You taste like fire," she says. "You taste like soot. Bitter, like red wine, but there's something else. Something sweet. You taste like… like summer. Like hot winds and suffocating flowers. You taste like nothing I have ever tasted. You taste like ambrosia. You taste divine."

"Oh, come off it. You're not serious, are you?" He masks the severity of the question with a laugh, like it might somehow erase the fact that she's inches away from him with her prosthetic hand still framing his jaw, but it doesn't. "It's not like I'm—"

"—a Blood Saint?" she supplies. "That is correct: you aren't. You are quite possibly the furthest thing from a Blood Saint I could ever imagine. You are bestial and selfish and bloodthirsty, clearly a man possessed more of passion than composure—" Her knee, cloaked in white, presses flush with his groin, "—and yet your blood is something beyond anything I have ever drank in this city. I don't understand. How? How are you like this?"

Gritting his teeth, he squirms in restrained pleasure under her leg. There is no possible way she cannot feel him now. "How'm I supposed to know? Not like I make a habit of drowning in me own blood or anything. I don't do anything special. Stick a needle in when I need a bit of juice, just like the others."

"You are not like the others," she says.

"Yeah?" He grins up at her. "Look who's talking. Posh lady from Cainhurst with a good bit of Hunter in her."

In a deft twist, she maneuvers her hand from his jaw and captures his chin between her thumb and forefinger. Residual body heat bleeds through the red metal as she tilts it upward, forcing him to meet her eye. It's as if a pick has been speared down his backbone; he sits in his chair, rigid as a cathedral wall, senses afire, breath short, watching her with sparking coals in the pit of his stomach.

"I don't understand you," she breathes, her voice a hushed murmur. The storm outside presides over her with booming bouts of thunder. "Your motives are self-centered. Your creed is questionable. You undoubtedly live for thrill. Of course, that isn't surprising because you cannot die, but you still need something to feel alive. That's what this is. That is hunting for you, isn't it?"

"Sure. Hunting's nice. I don't mind it. Gets the ol' ticker going fast enough." Jamison hooks his left leg around the back of her knee, his heel planting over top of the sheet trailing onto the floorboards, and tugs her a step closer. "But so does a lot of other things."

Satya bites softly at her lower lip, as if lost for words. The sight of her fangs makes his throat ache, like she still has her nails embedded in his shoulder while she sips from the marks she'd made, her tongue fire-hot against his skin. The countenance crossing her face suggests she might share a similar thought, and if he's being honest, he might not mind it if she did it again.

Slowly, he slides his thumb over the side of his neck. Although it's still tender, it is somehow less so than before—the moonstone, perhaps?—and when he draws away, blood swathes the callused pad of his finger. He gives it a playful jab in her direction with the intent to tease, but the hard shift of her mesmerizing eyes to his mock offering implies something far more serious. The stiffness straining his trousers is already close to unbearable; the thought of her licking down his lifelines and closing her lips around his thumb shoves a hitch in his breath.

"You madman," she says, but not without a note of interest. "Just because I'm not like every other blue-blooded sycophant you've come across does not mean I have granted you an invitation to try your luck."

Jamison bares his teeth in a wide smile. "Hey, hey, hey, what makes you think I'm trying? First of all, I'm lucky as it is. Let's be honest. And second, I've been proper and well behaved so far. I think so, at any rate. Went from the Hunt to here without all the racket and noise. No squaring off with anybody in the street. Miracle, too, innit, with all the ratbag Churchmen running about." He curls two quicksilver fingers around her prosthetic hand and guides it down from his chin. "No knickers and that right bastard of a storm aside, you're the one who's got a fang in me like you're never gonna get another drop again. Didn't you just get done telling me I taste… what was it again? 'Divine'?"

"That might have been the word I used, yes." Her attention has not left the smear of blood on his thumb. "If I recall correctly, you are the one who grabbed me when I bit down."

"I did, yeah. But in my defense, it bloody hurt."

"I told you it would hurt," she says.

"Right, but if somebody tells you, 'oi, this is gonna hurt,' you still don't know just how much 'til it's happened, y'know?"

A brief nod. "Mm. I suppose. If you put it that way."

"I am putting it that way."

With a set jaw, Satya seizes his outstretched hand and enfolds it in her own. Her fingers roll over knuckles and metacarpals and tendons and ease his palm open with precise, meticulous movements. With her thumb wedged between his index and middle fingers, she lowers her mouth to where his blood still paints his print. The wet warmth of her tongue briefly glides across his skin, as if to taste, and when he tenses beneath her touch—shivers crawl down his bones, gnaw at his nerves, whisper at his ear—she takes pause to look him in the eye.

"Mister Fawkes," she says. Soft, yet firm. It isn't a question, but it is implied.

Impulse guides him. Biting his lip, he adjusts his legs around her hips and lifts himself out of the chair. He slides one quicksilver foot forward under the drape of her sheet while his right hand flexes in the absence of the moonstone. Jamison's heart hammers under his sternum as he towers over her, his thoughts fogged and adrenaline dazed. Pain pulses in his throat, knocking stronger with each heavy heartbeat, a connecting rhythm to keep him collected. A part of him knows he's bleeding still—honestly, he's not sure he ever stopped—but bleeding is hardly a worry. He's been drenched from head to toe in countless creatures' echoes; he'll be damned if a little blood is going to stop him now.

"You sure you wanna do that?" His voice is sepulchered in a rasp.

"That depends," she says, and meets him in a half-step forward. "Do you think I should?"

Jamison draws a shaky inhale to slake his lungs. She is close, yes, but not quite flush. He can't feel her the plane of her belly, the slope of her waist, the swell of her breasts, but he can feel her body heat and the thick of her thigh nudged between his legs, and he can certainly feel her hip pressed firmly against his cock. He wants to sate the thing howling and salivating for release inside of him; he wants her to bite him and tease him and bury him amongst the bedspread, but he also wants to plant her face down into the rumpled sheets with a hand splayed over her back and—

"Not my decision," he manages, trying his absolute best to focus. "You said things needed changing, right? Right. So things changed. You got me as a bodyguard already, plus whatever blood I'm doling out now, but we're not mates or anything. I hunt with you and kill for you, sure, not much else. Small talk, maybe. That's acquaintances in a nutshell, innit?"

She gives a hum of acknowledgement. "I'm inclined to agree. But I didn't simply say I wanted to change things. I also said our current acquaintanceship already had strings attached. Do you remember?"

In spite of everything, a smirk finds him. "Yeah. I'm thinking it's a couple more now with you fanging in on me neck."

"Several, I'm sure." Slowly, she brings his thumb to rest against the warmth of her lips. "Logically speaking, I don't see why adding another should make our situation any worse."

With a lit spark burrowed in his chest, Jamison reaches out and crushes her to him. He holds his prosthetic hand flat across her back, holding her in place, a suppressed groan swallowed back behind his teeth. It doesn't matter that she's still covered; her body molded with his stokes the cinders lining his lungs, his heart, his belly. Having her arched against him with her leg hooked around the back of his knee decimates his resolve, and the warmth of her breath as she kisses his red fingerprint is too light, too much, too good. Sucking in an aching inhale, he untwines his hand from hers and carves back behind her neck to thread through her hair—fuck, he thinks, it's still damp; she's still damp—and then without another thought, he reaches down, lifts her by the thighs, and hefts her onto the table.

Her mouth is on his neck before she lands. Ankles locked behind his legs, she grinds against his erection as she singles out the painfully tender spot on his throat and starts to suck. Dizzy and overwhelmed, Jamison gropes up her thighs and rocks against her, pleasure twisting at the base of his spine. Every inch of her feels hot, addictingly hot, even through the wound fabric of the sheet, and while the deeper part of him would like nothing more than to rip it off of her just to feel all of the wonderfully soft heat beneath, he cages it back behind his molars and settles for grabbing her backside instead because despite all his swagger and carelessness, he doesn't want to make a mess of this—not with her.

When Satya dips back from his neck, lips smudged with sanguine, he stills himself to look at her face. Even with blood on her mouth, she still cuts a regal portrait. Tiny birthmarks dot her cheek, mouth, and chin. Her jet hair flares past her shoulders in mussed waves and draws attention to her slender neck and sculpted collarbone. Her eyes, stark topaz lit by guttering flame, climb up from her bite to his jaw, and then to meet his gaze.

"Mister Fawkes," she says. Thunder bursts overhead, but her murmur crashes through him like gunfire.

"Miss Vaswani." His fingers follow her backbone and spread up and over the plateaus of her shoulder blades. "Gotta tell you, though, since we're adding more strings and all—Jamison's fine."

"Very well. Jamison, then." She leans forward, a hair's breadth away. "If you insist."

"Fucking oath I insist," he breathes, and kisses her fiercely.

It isn't at all like having a pash with some rotten random after a good Hunt. Instead of choking on a miasma of smoke and alcohol, this feeling reminds him of lying upon crushed velvet. Not the shoddy stuff, either; the good kind that not even the white-robed Church doctors can get, all plush like coiffed cloud tops and warm like sun-basked spring afternoons. It calls to something in him, something down past the hulking blond wolf; back to when the days were long, sundrenched, and the nights weren't so endless. Her lips harbor the familiar astringent tang of blood, the taste he's come to associate with plunging headfirst into the Dream, but this is different. Affectionate. Safe. Wanted.

While he never imagined he'd like the taste of steel in his mouth, he certainly doesn't mind it in hers.

Softly and with the barest hint of teeth, Satya sucks at his lower lip and beckons him closer, her hands combing through his hair. Rapacious and frantic and starved for touch, he allows himself a groan as her nails catch his scalp and drift down the muscle in his shoulders. All thoughts have been derailed; the Church and the Kegs and the Hunt and the storm seem worlds away from here, suspended at dusk on another pillar's silhouette with the moon a newly minted silver overhead. All that matters now is her, how good this feels, how hard she makes him, how her perched on the table amongst his discarded gear with the loose folds of her sheet tempting bare skin renders her nigh irresistible—and all the great gods be damned, he hasn't got it in him to resist any longer. He has done nothing but resist ever since she stood over him in the forest with her blade poised at his throat; he has done nothing but resist every single bloody word, thought, and impulse because Hunters should be bastions of humanity, not beasts, but now that she is here before him, barely dressed, legs laced at his back, and hips grinding purposefully against his, he has no intention of resisting again.

To punctuate the thought, Jamison guides her flush with his cock and gives her ass a generous squeeze. He bites at her lip as pleasure knits deep in his lower belly, and he swears he hears her murmur his name somewhere among the crashing thunder. He loves how she sounds against his mouth, all the quick inhales and muffled sighs and hummed moans cut short and devoured. If he could somehow etch each one into his mind like runes, he'd purge all metamorphoses and instead keep intricate tracings of her architecture sequestered away where no one else might eavesdrop. No matter how integral rune working has become, no Caryll rune's strength could possibly compare to the light she brings.

Breathless, Satya gives him a gentle kiss before pulling away. Her golden eyes are half-lidded, focused with a flicker of something he thinks is desire, although whether it is for the wellspring in his veins or the erection positioned between her legs, he can't be sure. A smear of faint red still decorates just below her lower lip, he notices, and the earlier drip of blood from when she'd drank from his neck has dried into a dark wavering line down her chin. As if to somehow chide him for the mess, her prosthetic fingers pat at his collarbone, tap-tap, tap-tap, before sloping downward and gliding along his chest.

Jamison shivers. A sudden spark traipses up his spine under her touch, but he lets her map her way from one birthmark to the next. It's a strangely intimate gesture, he realizes, and one he hadn't expected. Encounters in the past were always so quick and direct and with little overture as instant gratification was always preferred by both parties involved, so to have someone chart his body without immediately groping for his cock seems… bizarre, if he's honest.

Regardless of his views, Satya appears wholly entertained. A thin smile curves her lip as her right palm starts from the top of his collarbone, tracing along his pectorals, nails skimming where they can, while the other maneuvers down his ribcage and crosses over his stomach with warm, smooth metal. Frisson skips where she sketches over his skin—he can't remember anything feeling like that, not with anyone else, that's fucking fantastic—and coupled with how her legs have locked around his hips, he finds it more and more difficult to stay still. His lifelines itch, his mouth waters, and he's become achingly, painfully hard.

As she brushes over a freckle at his side, Jamison starts to tug at the sheet tucked beneath her arms. Already loosened over her bust, the white wrap wilts away from her like old petals. He remembers the twin marks on her right breast quite clearly, but now with no dress or corset or blanket to hide, he realizes they are not the only ones. Copious other dots and freckles dappling her skin are brought to light; they are scattered by the dark peaks of her nipples and the lithe slope of her belly, dipping down beneath her lap where the sheet still lays. He bites at the inside of his cheek as he slides his prosthesis down her ribs. Her skin is almost fiery beneath his fingerprints, he finds, beautiful and supple and satin-soft, and when he cups her breast in his left palm and thumbs over her nipple, she makes a low moan in the back of her throat.

If he hadn't felt the urge to touch her before (and he had), he definitely would now.

Satya arcs into his touch, both of her hands pathing down his sides, her legs spreading further apart as if to somehow coax him in. The carnal part of him hones in on that motion alone—if the blanket were gone and his trousers were discarded, there would be nothing stopping him from feeling just how wet and warm she'd be, how slick she'd feel against his cock, or how much she'd want to be filled. The heat collected between her thighs already teases at how hot she might be if she were laid bare: back down upon the mattress, black hair fanned into a tangled halo, full breasts rising and falling with each breath, legs open, waiting, wanting—

He leans forward and crushes her in a feverish kiss again, once, twice, before planting enthusiastic bites along her neck and shoulder and then sinking down to mark a place just nestled at the start of her trapezius plane. She releases a short exhale in what might be surprise, and her legs clasp tightly around the backs of his. As he starts to rock against her, he skims two fingers along her waist only to hook around the final folds of the linen in her lap. Her mouth finds a spot by his ear, her breath spurring a jolt through his backbone, and she nips at the lobe with one fang. Zeal fueling his gatling heartbeat, adrenaline captures his body in a clambering tremor. She makes him feel so utterly and indescribably raw, like she peels away every last shred of civility he could ever hope to pin to himself so he might play at acting his station and tosses it all to the wayside; she strips him down, digs his ribs apart, and pries him open so that she exposes each violent, shuddering heartbeat.

"Jamison," she says, placing her hand upon his reaching arm.

"Satya." It's as if the wind has been stolen from his lungs at the sound of his name.

"Are you all right?"

He offers a grin. "A bit stiff at present. You?"

"Afflicted by a different problem, but I'm rather well, all things considered. I do think, however," she says, nodding toward the featherbed, "that we ought to continue this elsewhere."

"Righto. Table's like to give you a bloody splinter anyway. Not too keen on having another piece of wood sticking out of either of us."

Without a second thought, Jamison scoops her up by her thighs and lifts her off the tabletop. The white sheet almost seems to drip off of her, the rumpled folds bunched and entwined amongst her hips and legs in a disheveled waterfall. He corrals extra creases and pleats among his arms and holds her close as he strides across the room. To have her half-swathed in such a clinging cover reminds him of something lost, something holy, like the hordes of women carved naked in reverence and pain and glory, poised in prayer and desperation upon the Grand Cathedral's steps with naught but sheets concealing their anguish. He's certain she could outshine them all, saints and martyrs alike.

Jamison dips down and settles her at the end of the mattress, allowing her to sink into the clean bedding. Once he's sure she's comfortable, he straightens his back and adjusts his trousers, but before he can think to do anything else, he feels her hands frame his hips with a firm pressure. Glancing downward, he catches a mischievous glimmer in her eye, and her index fingers start to tap at his belt.

"I think it is only fair," she says. One polished nail lifts at the pewter buckle, expectant.

He bends forward in a what he assumes is a courteous bow. "If you insist."

"I do insist," she says, and accentuates it by running two fingers along the stiffness straining by his hip.

It feels so fucking good. Sucking in a deep breath through his teeth, he focuses on steadying his hands and plucking the buckle's tooth out from the old leather cinched around his waist. Once the belt is undone, he moves past her waiting hands to pick at the laces, loosening them by tugging out the lower loops one by one. It's a bit difficult to concentrate when her fingers seem to gravitate ever inward. His choice approach for this tends to be less for show and more of a frenzied gotta get this off right fucking now method of stripping, but he is quite sure she'd be cross with him if he decided to simply toss all his clothes and pin her to the mattress without any introduction. If he's honest, having to fumble with his trousers for a good minute seems a small price to pay in comparison.

"So," he says, hooking his thumbs at the worn waistline, "got any rules?"

She appraises him with casual interest. "Rules? I can't say I expected that from you."

"What? Just 'cause I'm a Hunter don't mean I haven't got any manners," he says.

"I think we have two different understandings of what manners are." Amused, Satya pensively rubs her thumbs along his hipbones, her attention brought to his erection curved up by the opened laces. "As for rules, I know I don't particularly care for surprises."

"All right. Let you know, then. Can do." Chewing at his lip in thought, he starts to work his belt out of its loops with his prosthetic hand. "Little wary of the biting. Don't exactly feel like bleeding out on the pillows, y'know? Not that I wouldn't mind leaving a mess for that drongo downstairs to clean up or anything. Some biting's fine, maybe. Neck, shoulder. Just no chompers below the belt."

"I'll abstain from making any other marks, but I might have another taste." She starts to trace the prominent outline through the cloth. Despite how slight her movements are, it still makes him shiver. "If that is all right with you?"

"Just as long as you don't taste too much," he says, dragging down his trousers by the hip. "I'm gonna be needing some of it, 'specially if you want what you got there."

A playful smirk teases the side of her mouth. "I'm perfectly capable of pacing myself, dear Hunter. The question is," she says, her bare hand curving around his cock, "are you?"

Jamison digs his nails into his palm as a pleasurable shock short circuits through his nerves. It wouldn't be so bad if she were fully dressed, but with the thin linen tucked just around her hips and with her muscled stomach and ample breasts exposed, the warmth of her hand climbs through him in a way that pares away his restraint. Trying to compose himself does little, and only results in him taking a step closer so she can reach him without strain. With his trousers bunched mid-thigh and his mind cleansed of any coherent thought, Jamison bites at the inside of his cheek as her fingers work down his girth to the very base, and then upward again with a tighter, stronger stroke.

A low groan stitches in his throat. His knees feel weak—a product either of the night's prior blur of gory affairs or of just how incredible it feels to have her touch him unhindered, he isn't sure which. His first instinct is to reach out for her, to grab a hold of her shoulders or to knot his hands in her hair, but he doesn't. Instead, he smooths his good hand across where she'd marked him, the imprint of her fangs embedded into the left side of his neck, carefully incised as if on a gravestone. When she squeezes around him in another downward stroke, he imagines how she'd looked after she'd drank, staring at him with such bestial avarice, and presses down.

The pain is fleeting now, but his body still responds. Mouth open, he breathes out a jagged and broken ahhh, the sound he'd wanted to make while she stood between his legs and sipped at his throat but couldn't due to bloody stupid societal constraints he'd truly meant to keep until she effectively told them all to bugger off—fuck, and she'd made that decision, too; does that mean she'd wanted to do this all along? His brain buzzes with a litany of questions, all melding together as she slowly slopes her thumb over the head of his cock, tender and teasing. She'd rubbed her thigh against him without prompt—clearly a man possessed more of passion than composure—so she must have seen, must have felt, but when? Was it when he leaned against the wall, when he was soaking up warmth by the fire, when he sat in the chair with her clothes hung at his back?

Soft heat glides across his skin. The sensation is almost blinding; sparks skip in his lungs and dissolve in the pit of his stomach. He glances downward to see Satya's tongue pathing up the length of him, her lips parted and fangs bared. A tight coil of trepidation unfurls between his shoulder blades at the thought of teeth, but when she reaches the top, she presses a light kiss against him, as though that might somehow assuage any worry. Her prosthetic hand draws a soothing pattern over his right hip, placating and kind; another peculiarly intimate gesture, he realizes, and a distant part of him questions it, but even if he'd wanted to ask, there is nothing intelligible in him that could form the words.

Gradually and with the exasperating sort of carefulness she always seems to employ, she angles his cock against her mouth and lets him start to sink in. A terrible tremble clambers through his arms, his legs, his back, and it becomes very apparent that any remaining shards of aplomb he might have wanted to keep tucked away are destined to be shattered and with little ceremony. Everything is hot and wet and the velvet flat of her tongue strokes the underside of him just where he's most sensitive and the sweet pressure of her lips squeezing down inch by inch is enough to drive him mad. He breathes out a moan, all guttur and gravel while white starbursts spot the darkness behind his eyelids. His palm itches down his lifelines for contact; he should be underneath her, he thinks, reaching out for her shoulders; he should have her thighs, her hips, her calves in his hands; he should have her rocking over his mouth and whispering hushed hymnals as she kisses down his belly.

The rhythm she sets makes his pulse envelop him. Muted pain throbs in the side of his neck and nerve splitting pleasure threatens to devour him from within. He palms her shoulders with eagerness, his good hand slick with sweat. Each of her movements plucks his words away only to shove them back as throaty curses when her hand tightens beneath her mouth at the end of a stroke. He wants so badly to cup the back of her head and thrust into her—he's getting close, he is, he can feel the ache already sharpening, and he moves his hips to tempt a faster pace but she remains constant, unwavering, beautiful, perfect—

"Oi, oi, oi, hold up, hold up, stop a second."

Instantly, everything ceases. Satya draws away, a faint expression of concern crossing her brow. Her hand stays curled around the base of his cock, but her grip loosens just enough to become negligible.

"Are you all right?" she asks.

Jamison knocks down a hard swallow as he lets his senses settle. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm fine. Just got too into it, is all. I don't wanna… well." He laughs in explanation, lifting one hand from her shoulder to catch a smear of sweat from his temple. "Not yet, anyhow. Got other stuff I wanna try."

"Such as?" Her index finger teases the length of him with a feathery touch.

Heartbeat thrumming in his ears, he kicks off his knee-bound trousers and dips into a kneel before the bed. The quicksilver of his right leg is cold against his thigh, but he pays it no mind. Impatience cords his muscles; he snakes his fingers beneath the fold of the white sheet still wrapped at her waist and gives it a testing tug.

"Well, you was yabbering on and on about how I taste just a little while ago. Don't remember exactly what it was you said… Something about it being holy, I think?" He glances upward and searches her eyes for approval. "I got that in me head. Won't bloody stop, either. The whole time you got this thin cover on you and I can't stop thinking 'bout how you'd taste underneath."

"Interesting." In acquiescence, she shifts one leg to the side to allow him access. "Was that before or after I commented on your blood?"

"I… I dunno, actually. Before? Maybe? Don't really remember." He grabs a fistful of fabric and yanks it out of the way. "All I know is—fuck."

Gods help him: she looks gorgeous and queenly in all her Cainhurst finery, but she looks absolutely heart stopping without. The tiny birthmarks continue past her navel and dot at her inner thighs and amongst the dark thatch of hair between her legs. Taut muscle honed by years of swordplay and practice runs through her calves, her thighs, her stomach, her arms. The curves of her breasts and hips grant her such a tempting sight, and he yearns to grab hold and bring her over top of him—his cock, his face, it doesn't matter; the need to feel her splinters through him at every turn.

"Is that good?" she asks mildly, her prosthetic hand brought beneath her chin in amusement.

"Bloody oath it is. I could look at you for days." Jamison licks the side of his mouth and nudges himself closer. He's rock hard, aching for release, but he does his best to ignore it, even if he has to endure the pressure of the mattress against him in order to get to her. "Don't even need any of those pretty clothes or trinkets. You look just fine without 'em."

"That is how we are expected to dress in Cainhurst. If you present yourself as a filthy miscreant, no one will take you seriously." Satya reaches out with prosthetic fingers, palm turned up, blood gem sparkling, and draws a line along the length of his jaw. "You know, I wouldn't mind seeing you dressed in similar attire. If you got rid of those horribly shabby clothes and had a clean shave, you might pass for a Cainhurst Knight."

He sticks his tongue out in disapproval. "I'd rather hunt in the nick."

"I would be very interested in seeing how that plays out for you. In your expert opinion, would a cannon on your arm make the beasts more or less likely to take you as a serious threat when you're sprinting down the streets without any trousers?" A pleased smirk tilts her lips. "My thought is less."

"Oh, I'll show you less," he says, and captures her in a biting kiss.

Everything about her drowns him in decadence. The metal sapor has fled from her tongue, but she still tastes like sweet adrenaline and the heady zeal of combat. Having her hands framing his jaws while he touches her breasts and squeezes down her waist and hips is almost dizzying. His mouth's every move is mirrored and doubled with ease; she presses herself to him like he's an inferno in the dead of winter, and he loves it.

If this is what awaits him in whatever strange amalgamated thing their acquaintanceship has become, Jamison doesn't think he could ever tire of it. He doesn't want to ever tire of it. Hell, just having the bloody chance of growing tired of it would be a fucking godsend. If he could somehow return at the end of each night and lose himself in everything carnal with her, he would, gladly and wholeheartedly and without question. Kissing her carves him open and his brain is too busy orchestrating the rest of his body to consider how the mathematical improbability of this particular event happening a second time should seem absolutely astronomical, but it doesn't matter because Jamison is not at all of the contemplative type—an opportunist, really—and the current opportunity at hand is eating her out until she screams.

Spurred by tightening threads of anticipation, he dips down and shoulders open her thighs, guiding the bends of her knees upward so her calves rest down his back. Her skin is so wonderfully warm, and as he mouths aggressive trails down her hipbones, he realizes that not even fire could compare. Fire makes him sweat and burn, but she makes him absolutely ache. The phenomenal feel of her skin, the perfect contours shaping her body, the sweet spice from her neck, her breasts, her hair; she chips away at him piece by piece, unspooling his restraint like dethreading a blood gem from an overworked blade. Something scratches at the back of his mind, a faint and teasing lilt about Hunters and baser instincts (he knows he's guilty, he knows he had no bloody chance in keeping the acquaintance in acquaintanceship; really, now, could anyone blame him?) but he ignores it, he has to, because he'll be damned if he's not going to stick around for her sighing his name, no matter how excruciatingly human she makes him feel.

With his prosthetic hand clasped on Satya's thigh, he lets his left leisurely coast up from the back of her knee toward the coarse hair between her legs. He nips at all the soft, tender spaces he can reach: her belly, her hips, her inner thighs, the sensitive juncture between her leg and groin. The impatient roll of her hips spreads a smile into each eager kiss, and he uses his teeth and tongue to his advantage to tease out more. At one certain place just on the inside of her left thigh, he gives a mild bite before sucking against her skin. It should surface as a mark to mirror the one she'd left on his throat. A small bruise isn't as permanent (or as painful) as a mark made by fangs, but even if she only sees it in the interim, it will still serve its purpose: a reminder of him each time she undresses.

Jamison plants another bite further up her thigh as he dips two fingers inward. She is so incredibly, unbelievably wet, and it sends his pulse soaring skyward. The very thought of him making her this way twists a potent spike of pleasure through his lower belly. It isn't quite like hunting or bloodshed or giving himself to the Old Blood, but it still gives him that sharp and exhilarating euphoria that kneads into him when the moon hangs high. She's hot and wet and lusting and she wants him, a bloody Hunter; him, the bloody Hunter she'd watched die over roots and rocks and earth; him, this disheveled, chaotic beast of a man with visceral hunger in his heart and gunpowder in his veins; and that renders him a hard, rapturous, breathless mess.

Grinning against her skin, he maneuvers the same two fingers up and downward in a teasing line. It parts her just barely, allowing him to feel just how wet she's become without pushing in. He gives her one final nip on the thigh before kissing across to where his fingers have touched, and when he hears her breathe a moan of approval, he leans in for a taste. She smells nothing short of intoxicating, and with the flat of his tongue trailing up to massage over her clit, he finds that she tastes even better. Better than the metal of blood, he thinks; better than those dodgy elixirs steeped in empyreal hues that numb the world, better than potent cocktails packed with spirits and offerings, better than the scant savory delights the Kegs occasionally swipe from the pie shop in Yharnam proper, better than everything.

"Jamison," says Satya, one hand curling through his blond hair.

Something electric crackles down his spine. Her nails grazing his scalp force tiny jolts of pleasure behind his neck and ears. "Mm?"

"Stop teasing." Authority hews her voice. Her heels press firmly below his shoulder blades. Her shoulders pinch together against the mattress as her prosthetic hand coils amongst the white bedsheet; every hurried breath accentuates the curves of her breasts. He can feel her flex around the tips of his fingers, as if to entice him in.

Satisfaction flutters behind his ribs. He is thoroughly enticed. "If you insist."

He glides his tongue over her and thrusts in. Instantly, her hips rock forward to meet him, and he is rewarded with a breathy moan. She squeezes so tightly around his fingers—fuck, she is absolutely soaked—and it's all he can do to keep himself from groaning into her. The sensation of her clenching with each repetition spears at him with a raw, savage desire, and he wants nothing more than to sink himself into her, to have her spread beneath him and biting at his neck, his shoulder, his clavicle, to render her unraveled in a sated, sweaty mess, and by the gods, it makes him weak. It makes him so frustratingly, undeniably weak because he doesn't want this for what it is; he wants it because it's her.

And something about that doesn't make sense to him. It doesn't. Sex has always been so impersonal and he's never remembered faces because his memory's never been that great anyway and why bother when it's just a bit of fun and nothing else, you know, but her—oh, her—he doesn't even know why, either—fuck, why her? Why is it her?—he can remember her down to every mark, every contour, every little painstaking detail; he can remember the gentle crease by her eyes when she smiles (when she smiles), the little trifecta flecked at her cheekbone, the crimson intricacies of her arm, and the deep, rich cut of the blood gem ensconced within her palm. He could memorize every inch of her with his hands, his hips, his mouth, and he's more than tempted to try. With how bloody fantastic she feels on his fingers, he can only imagine what she will feel like around his cock, and everything in him whips taut as he hums a low murmur against her and swirls soft circles over her clit, reveling in every appreciative noise she makes. Jamison savors it all: her softness, her scent, her musky-sweet tang, and it sings to him down to his very marrow.

When Satya squeezes her thighs against his face, it becomes almost unbearable. Her fingers tangle in his hair and her palm shoves him flush and her muscles cord with impatience, desperation, need. He accommodates her with a curve in his fingers and a deeper angle. Heels digging into his back, she arches into him and succumbs to a low moan, a tapestry of jagged vowels and hitched consonants that might be whispered curses if he cared to sew them all together. Her voice is ariose among the discordant crashes of thunder and the rhythm of the rain; she sounds so good, so incredibly good, he wishes he could hear her like this every night whether he's between her legs or beneath her as she arcs over him and drains from the wellspring lodged behind his sternum.

It isn't long before her body draws tight. Her nails scrub at his scalp, knotting through shocks of blond and tugging him close. Language has left her lungs, but her body shouts paragraphs for him in her stead. Jamison rolls his tongue and tries to focus on breathing, on keeping a hastened pace, on listening to her come apart, and with a deep and shivering ahhh, the knotted tension in her snaps. What little composure she has splinters into forgotten fragments as she crushes him between her thighs; she constricts around him in waves that wrack her body to completion, and he meets each one with pumping fingers and an eager mouth.

Once she starts to descend from the consuming high, there is a moment or two where everything slows to a stop. Her ragged respiring levels out to a gentle quiet under the strength of the storm, and her legs slope open and begin to loose him from their vise. Perspiration mists her neck and temple and runs down her belly. He carefully withdraws his hand—she shudders, squeezing, her fingers still snarled amongst tousled blond—and he shoulders the weight of her thighs into the bend of each arm. Her taste lingers on his tongue, his lip, his chin, and it fuels an electric current down his backbone.

What was it she called him again? He tries to remember, his thoughts steeped in a lusty haze. He's still hard and all he can think about is shoving her back against the center of the mattress, her legs locked around his hips and her mouth on his throat. The image of her staring at him with unfettered want as drips of red smeared her lip burns at the back of his mind. Draped in a swath of marble white and hands clamped down upon his cheeks, her gaze had injected tendrils of adrenaline through his bloodstream.

Don't play dim with me, Mister Fawkes. You taste like fire. You taste like ambrosia. You taste divine.

Jamison bites his lip, reeling. Yes. Fuck, yes, yes, that's it. Divine.

The scent of sweat and sex saturates his senses. As he slides his palms up to the swell of her hips, he leans in between her thighs and indulges in one final lick. The flat of his tongue gently parts her, gliding through slick softness and heat until she sucks in an inhale and breathes something hushed that might be his name.

Divine, he thinks, the word bearing a rune's palpable weight. Divine, divine, divine.

Satya curves her hand down the back of his neck. She gives him a coaxing, upward pull; he can hear the silent come here in how her fingers thread through his hair, and that is all the direction he needs. Lifting himself off the floor, he ignores the pins and needles knitting through his left knee and promptly climbs onto the featherbed. He follows her lead as she situates herself toward its center, a delighted quiver clambering through his bones at every light touch sketched down his sides. The warmth of her skin engulfs him as she kisses him and brings him down over top of her; it kindles a fierce blaze down his vertebrae like cinders spilled upon an oil-soaked cloth.

"Insatiable," she admonishes breathlessly against his mouth. "Are you always like this?"

A part of him wants to say no, I'm not, because it's the truth: he isn't like this, not always, not to this extreme; but fuck, he is like this, he very much is, at least in this very moment, and all because of her—the sheer amount of self-control he already lacks plummets quite drastically when she is near, and apparently even more so when her clothing is missing and she is inclined to let him do something about it. He could tell her he's thought of her killing him more times than he'd like to admit or that he's been inexplicably attracted to her since he died under her gaze that night or that he wants her to suck him dry in more ways than one, but his thoughts are a cacophonous conglomerate of if you insist and I'll show you insatiable and I want you so bloody bad and it's all he can do to keep himself from spreading her legs apart so he can sate the beast buried down beneath.

Strapped for words and unable to construe a coherent thought, he kisses her, backed by teeth and tongue and desperation. His left hand slips between the sheets and the small of her back and angles her against his body. She responds in kind, shifting her thighs so he can settle comfortably between them. The marvelous pressure when he grinds against her is nearly enough to make him see stars; being brought flush with wet heat and having the underside of his cock slick back and forth over top of her is excruciating.

"For such a mad and impulsive thrill-seeker," she says, a teasing whisper at his ear, "you certainly are taking your time."

He presses his forehead to hers, keeping a groan locked away at the back of his throat. "So quick's your thing, then?"

"Not necessarily. But from how you reacted earlier, it did seem like it was yours."

As if to demonstrate, her hand dips down his belly, and she takes hold of him with dexterous fingers. Her thumb traces tender circles up and up and up until she reaches the head of his cock, and when a needy noise pries itself out of him—fuck, she has to know how good this feels, she has to know how badly he wants her, she has to know, has to—Satya drops a light kiss at his lower lip and guides him down, down, letting him feel how hot and wet she is, how soft, how inviting, how easily he can nudge her folds apart—

"C'mon," he says through gritted teeth, "c'mon, you're driving me—"

"—mad? Yes, I know. It's actually—"

"—bloody unbearable. D'you know what you're doing to me? I've got—"

"—permission," she says, "if that is what you're looking for."

"I… I'm… wait. What?"

Satya brings her prosthetic fingers up along his cheek, a faint smile crossing her countenance. "You want me, do you not?"

A shiver ripples down his neck, and he feels her slowly move his cock against her so that the tip just starts to press in. "Are—hah, are you—"

"Fuck me," she says.

Jamison doesn't need to be told twice.

He rolls his hips forward and fills her in one hard, desperate thrust. Pleasure sears through his nerves like devouring hellfire, shearing through him with relentless ease. When she clenches tight around him, he seizes up, gasping—his lungs hurt; breathe, he needs to breathe, he has to remember to bloody breathe—his head is swimming and it's like the world around him has been amplified ten thousandfold because he can focus on everything and nothing all at once: her moan resonates through him like an aria and inundates the vaults behind his breastbone in an overbearing chorus and her skin molds to him with the lightning pulse of a darkbeast and the deafening thunder crashes a hurricane through his skull and he can no longer tell the difference between his heartbeat and the thrum of the pouring rain.

Hands planted on her hips, knees bent, he leans backward in a heady daze and glances down at her as he starts to withdraw. Half-lidded chips of gold stare back at him with avarice, fangs settled on her lip in a tempting smile; a brief reminder of the mark he bears upon his throat. He lets the flawless image of her reclined before him etch into the back of his mind as he draws a shaky inhale and thrusts forward again. Tight, wet warmth welcomes him in with constricting skips of delicious frisson—fuck, she feels so good, the sheer heat of her makes him feel like he's being pulled apart, he can't stand it, he can't, he can't—all of his remaining temperance abrades and he's left with nothing but the fierce, violent ache earthed inside of him. A guttural groan pinned at the backs of teeth, he finally succumbs to the persistent impulse howling at him to hurry up and fucking move—and he shoves back in with shuddering force.

"Jamison." His name is a sharp breath on her tongue. Her hands twist into the sheet, her back a sudden arc.

A savage grin ensnares him. Nothing has ever sounded so satisfying.

The driving cadence his body takes is frantic, frenzied, he's needed this so bad, so incredibly bad, but it is eclipsed by every mimicked maneuver of her hips. She rocks with him, her body sheened in sweat, dark wisps of hair curled at her temple. He can feel her tighten and squeeze with every thrust as if to somehow keep him in, and the sweet friction of it alone makes him short of breath. Her skin sticks to his palm, and as he pushes in with another swift stroke, he feels the familiar pressure of her fingers hooking around his, set into the thick of her thigh. He works his jaw and tries to concentrate on haste and depth and the absolutely heavenly feel of her because he doesn't know if he will ever be able to do this again and he is just as guilty of wandering hands as anyone else, but then a brief flicker of recognition vies for his attention at the back of his mind: is she… holding his hand?

Amidst the tumult of the not-quite-enough rhythm and the almost overwhelming sensation threatening to ravage him from within, his thoughts veer off in another direction. Are… are you supposed to do that? he wonders absently, loosening his grip to rub the pads of his fingers over her knuckles. It occurs to him that he doesn't know. Is this something he ought to be acquainted with?

If it is, his nescience doesn't seem to matter. Satya's mouth opens in a moan, her entirety swaying beneath him as he rocks into her, and then she's reaching down between her legs with glinting red metal painting a brilliant fissure down her belly. He watches one sleek finger start to circle where his tongue had just before, and her body instantly responds in a writhing tremor. Pleasure claws through him as her inner muscles enfold every inch, slick and hot and perfect, and it's then that his concentration finally, finally narrows: the thunder, the rain, the fire, the bedframe's faint protests; they all get shut away as she sighs beneath him and grips his hand with increasing force and meets every ambitious thrust with equal measure.

He groans at the full, sharpening ache taking hold of him. Everything seems keen on splitting him to splinters. A heavy throb courses at his pulsepoints and he can feel it when he withdraws, when he watches himself slide out, when he plunges back in and spreads her wide, when she makes those delicately broken ahhhs and tightens around his cock until her name expels his throat in an exhale. Her finger continues deliberate patterns over her clit and he wishes it were his mouth still; her taste persists on his tongue and it evokes a vicious, vehement spear of want in the hollow of his chest because there is still so much he can do, should do, but can't, and even if he could it wouldn't be now because not even Hunters' stamina is that inexhaustible, and he should know: he's tried.

Everything in her coils tight in a ramping crescendo. She twists beneath him, fangs sunken into her lip, and her grasp on his hand stiffens.

"Don't stop," she says, a threadbare command. "Don't you dare stop—"

"I won't," says Jamison. "C'mon, I got you."

He drives into her as she comes, her voice a fractured hymn struck through his skull, and it nearly launches him off the edge; that sweet, constant wave, that slicking and contracting and pushing around him, the heat and warmth squeezing, welcoming, asking, begging—

Clamping his teeth on his tongue to wrench himself back from the brink, he stills his body and breathes and leans down over her in her shaking aftermath, mouth pressed to her ear: "If you want another bite outta me—" He then raises his hips, working out with agonizing slowness, "—it's gonna have to be real bloody soon."

He feels Satya nod against his cheek in acknowledgement. Not even two seconds pass before she shifts beneath him and her fangs grope for that tender spot at the left side of his neck. When she bites down, he thrusts in, and it knocks the wind straight from his lungs.

"Fuck," he gasps, hands knotted in the sheets above her head. "That—hah, that feels—you feel—"

Satya sucks at his throat and massages up his shoulder blades with short yet controlled movements, kneading into tender pressure points and stretches of thick muscle. He relinquishes his train of thought in a low moan spoken into the black swath of her hair. The pinprick pain of her teeth and the deft attention of her hands and the palpitations of his heart and the perfect feel of her clenching around him render him wordless, breathless, delirious; she could drain him dry and he would embrace it with deference.

It doesn't take long until he's close again. The rhythmic roll of his hips hastens, the insufferable ache sharpening back into a rapidly approaching peak. Sweat drips from his temple as he rocks into her, lusting and desperate, and he struggles just to keep his breathing even. One hand gravitates from the broad plane of his shoulder to his neck, his hair, his jaw, a light and feathery caress to contrast the knifelike fangs lodged in the side of his throat. Her body presses close to him, her breasts and belly brought wonderfully flush, and when her tongue laves across his incisions upon the apex of another urgent stroke, a cracked and jagged noise spills out of him and onto the mattress.

"I'm—hah, I can't—can't last much longer," he manages. "Where—"

"Anywhere," she says against his skin.

His brain is thick with fog and he tries to parse what that implies. "You—you're sure?"

As if to encourage him, her prosthetic hand guides a gentle path down the braid of his backbone, and she brings her mouth to kiss the sensitive space just beneath his ear. "I'm certain."

Jamison shuts his eyes with ragged breaths and focuses on her, her warmth, her wetness, her touch, how she feels with each frantic thrust. Everything has built to a dizzying zenith; it's so close, he can feel it; the fullness, the wildfire, the unbearable ache; and he dips down to find her mouth amongst rumpled sheets and damp jet waterfalls and kisses her with ferocity. Metal drips onto his tongue as her fingers line his cheekbones, and all he can smell is the addicting amalgam of sweat and spice that sticks to her skin. He drives forward again, gasping against her lip at the throb of tight heat engulfing him, and when she presses her forehead to his and breathes his name, the mounting pressure detonates.

Pleasure crackles through him in an arc of lightning. It surges down his spine, sparking through spindles of oversensitive nerves, and he rocks into her again and again and again as each shock renders him sharp and shivering and suppliant with the silent psalm of Satya, Satya, Satya in his mouth. Plied with paroxysms, he plunges in one last time, as deep as he can—she feels incredible, he thinks, overcome; she's marvelous, exquisite, divine—and he digs his arms beneath her and crushes her against him as the final pulses crest and subside.

His heartbeat hammers in the film of his ears. He lies there, still, spent, chest heaving. His mind spins: he can't ever remember a time he'd come this hard. Was it the delay? The teasing? Denying himself in favor of giving her another drink? Fuck. It doesn't matter the reason. His memory is less than stellar, but he'll be damned if he doesn't remember this.

It is several moments before Jamison can find the strength to move again. Exhaustion weighs through every limb, and it is a laborious effort just to lift himself onto his elbows. Reluctance cords his movements as he starts to withdraw and roll off of her, but the gentle touch of her hand on his shoulder prompts his attention. He glances beneath him to her black pool of hair and high cheekbones and scattered speckles, and the grim sight of his blood spattered upon her lips makes him freeze.

"You are still bleeding," she murmurs. Two fingers exact precise, wincing pressure over the bite on his throat, and her prosthesis moves to cover the mess on her mouth, as if ashamed. "I… I'm sorry."

It must be her eyes, he thinks. It must be her expression, her concern. Or perhaps it's that she's suddenly become open, vulnerable, and that she's somehow made him that way, too. He honestly doesn't know how he's managed to avoid it this long; she has been elegant and heart stopping and deadly this entire time, enough to puncture adrenaline through his blood, but it's only now, only here, when all boundaries of caste and calling have been crossed, that he feels bare, transparent, human. She might encourage the darker things caged in him, but he'd be lying if he said she didn't hearten his humanity—and Jamison is a very poor liar.

He reaches out to guide her prosthetic hand away from her face. "Hey, all right, don't need to be sorry or anything. I ain't worried about it. I'm the one who said you could have another drop if you wanted, anyway, so's not your fault for taking me up on it."

Satya averts her gaze. "Still, I would like to apologize. It was not becoming. I… I couldn't stop. I don't know what came over me."

"I do." He grins at his own joke. When he realizes she isn't laughing, he lets it fall away and clears his throat. "Right. Well, I said it weren't no trouble, and I meant it. If anything, it just means you'll be right for tomorrow, yeah? Not like you're drinking litres. I mean, I got enough blood in me still, so I'm not going anywhere. Everything's still ticking."

Slowly, the pressure on his neck abates. "Are you positive?"

He thumps a fist over his sternum. "Ah, no worries. Me heart'll keep up just fine."

Except that is a lie. That is a stark, bold-faced lie, and he knows it. His heart will not keep up just fine because something is happening to him and he hasn't the faintest idea on how to go about addressing it. She should not make him feel like he can't quite catch his breath or that there is a slice of siderite lodged just under his rib, and yet she does. Release should have banished all of this nonsense as he gets notoriously hazy while under the influence, and yet it did not.

Jamison withdraws and leans back on his haunches. This very well might be a problem.

Ahead, Satya draws herself into a straight-legged sit. Blood paints her lips, her hands, a choice place or two upon the sheets, and she appraises it all with a critical look of displeasure. She licks the two fingers that were upon his throat, but the work of her tongue alone cannot clean all the smears around her mouth.

"Would the proprietor be particularly cross if we were to ruin the sheets?" she asks, eyeing the abandoned wrap of linen at the foot of the bed.

He takes one glance behind him before focusing on the faint red droplets staining where she'd been. He licks his lip. Metallic sapor lingers there. "A little late for that now, innit?"

She frowns, following his gaze just past her hip. "Hm. Yes, I suppose it is."

"Go ahead and mop up what you need. I'll just nick us another set. Reckon that cheeky bastard downstairs should have 'em stashed somewhere." Jamison slings his legs off the mattress and lifts himself to his feet, grateful for an excuse to do something other than sit. It takes a moment for his equilibrium to settle, but once he's able to take a step without feeling like his knees might buckle, he snags his discarded belt and trousers off the floor before making his way toward the table.

"Let me get them," she says at his back. "I will take responsibility for this."

Jamison pauses mid-reach for his shirt. "Eh? What d'you wanna do that for?"

One end of the linen in hand, she scrubs at her mouth. "To freshen up, primarily. I assume this place has a water closet?"

"Oh." He hadn't considered that. "Uh, basin and all that's downstairs, I think. Second—no, third? Third. Yeah, third room on the left."

She nods appreciatively as she inspects the cleanliness of her hands. "I will need your clothes."

"You'll, uh… you'll what now?"

"Your clothes. I will need them."

"Right, yeah, I got that part. The part I didn't get is why."

"The simple answer is that buttons are easier to fasten than a back full of laces. The complex answer is that I would much rather button your shirt and trousers than stuff myself back into a heavy dress, a fully laced corset, and most likely still wet stockings just to walk down a flight of stairs to relieve myself only to walk back up the same flight of stairs and take it all off again." She glances up from wiping her lip, the sheet smudged a dark red. "Unless you would care to volunteer your assistance?"

Jamison swallows, suddenly reminded of exactly why his heart is a violent, thumping disaster. "Yeah, nah, I think I'll pass."

"That is what I thought. Your clothes, please." She motions toward herself with a polished finger.

Now acutely aware of her (and his) state of undress, he briefly contemplates McCree and the meddlesome loose-tongued lot downstairs and the barrage of comments he's sure to receive once Satya is seen requesting new linens dressed in his clothes, but he pushes the thought aside and does as he's told. He snatches his shirt and waistcoat from the back of the second chair and stuffs them in the crook of his arm with his trousers before crossing the room once more, the familiar thump-click of his quicksilver foot retorting against the wooden floorboards. When he draws up to the bedframe, she is preoccupied with bringing another fold of the sheet between her thighs to dab herself dry.

"Might be a bit big on you," he says, offering the damp bundle in an outstretched arm. "Got a little extra in the legs."

A wan smile shapes her mouth as she rolls up the used linen and sets it aside. "Well, thankfully a Cainhurst court is not waiting for me downstairs. As long as they don't slide right off, I think they will suffice."

Combing her prosthetic fingers through her tousled hair, Satya reaches out with her other hand and tugs the beige set of trousers from the pile folded in his arm. She shuffles into them with little effort, although Jamison has to give her his belt to make them stay fastened around her waist. After each leg has been rolled up to make sure nothing drags on the floor, she accepts the unbuttoned shirt from him and slides it on.

She sort of… swims in it, really, but the bulk of her prosthesis takes up the extra room in the left shoulder, so it does fill out, albeit in a lopsided manner. The shirt length falls far past her hips as if it were a tunic, and despite the fabric retaining a degree of dampness from the rain, it has lost any translucent qualities amongst its abundance of wrinkles. She seems unperturbed by the ill fit, however, and starts to pick at the top buttons.

As he stares with unabashed interest, it occurs to him that he rather likes seeing her in his gear. There is a strange charm to it, he thinks; she has always been in various forms of formal attire in his presence, and to witness her dressed down in such a way feels somehow intimate, like the shedding of her court persona into a plainclothes huntress was never meant for the likes of him to see. It doesn't help that the open front displays her toned stomach and ample breasts, of course, but he isn't about to complain.

Biting his lip, Jamison stoops downward and begins to help her by buttoning from the bottom. He thumbs each pewter piece through one by one until he meets her in the middle. She raises her eyes to him as she fastens the final button, a silent thank you if he's ever seen one, and proceeds to curl each sleeve upward in three distinct folds. As a last touch, perhaps to make herself look somewhat less disheveled, she tucks in the ends of his shirt into the waistband.

"Not bad," he says. "Don't even need the waistcoat."

She gives herself a once over. "It is a little loose, isn't it?"

"A bit, yeah. I'm sure me mates at the Workshop could get you a set of your own, if you wanted. You'd look a proper Hunter then."

"A generous offer, but I'm afraid I will have to decline. I have no intention of meeting your Powder Kegs, Mister Fawkes. I'm still a fugitive, in case you've forgotten."

He hefts the black waistcoat over his shoulder with a sigh. "I know, I know. Hunter gear just looks good on you, is all. Just need one of them coats and a pistol and you'd blend right in."

Satya's expression hardens. Fingers tapping across her metal knuckles, she pivots on the ball of her foot and strides with purpose toward the hearth. The fire still flares within its soot-strewn stones, the remaining chunks of blackened wood turned ashen under the flames' ravenous touch; it highlights her skin in a yellowed, writhing light as she slows before its jaws.

Jamison stands there, bewildered. Was it something he said?

Tension knotting in the thick of his throat, he lopes after her. The heat feels nice on his naked body as he approaches the fireplace, and a part of him must resist the urge to plant himself down in front of it again just to soak in the residual heat. He pauses two steps behind her, fingers kneading into the waistcoat's damp material, unsure of what he should say—had the Hunter comment offended her somehow? It wouldn't be the first time it's happened. His thoughts do have an unfortunate propensity to lag behind his mouth.

"You are going to be in a great deal of trouble for this," she says. "Aren't you?"

"Eh, I'm always in trouble. If it's not one thing, it's another. The Church, the Kegs, Yahar'gul." His shoulders bob in a shrug. "Everyone's got a bone to pick and I'm the bloody skeleton."

She turns halfway, and stares at not his face, but at his sternum. Her gaze seems to hollow out a hole through his ribcage where his heart thrums. "That is not what I meant," she says.

Realization dawns on him, albeit belatedly.

He swipes his left thumb over the side of his throat, just across the twin punctures nestled by his jugular. The gesture sculpts something oddly primal inside of him; it reminds him of just how close she was, of where her mouth has been, of the litany of praises she sang. The red sheen of blood catches at the corner of his eye, and he holds his hand outstretched to her, the flickering flame cast as an orange spark in his fingerprint: another mock offering.

"You're meaning this, then," he says.

Satya's countenance remains stoic, but her attention still flicks to his throat, his hand, and tension cords her neck. "What would they do to you?"

"What would they do? Nothing, 'cause they won't find out." Jamison wiggles his bloody thumb and hides it behind his back. "What they don't know can't hurt 'em, right?"

"But it could hurt you, you madman. The Church wants everything bestial properly expunged. You cannot think they'd never discover what I am or somehow catch wind of the Hunter who's kept me hidden." She scowls at him, her lips pressed in a thin line. "I know my risks. As far as I'm concerned, anything that would happen to me in Yharnam is a far better fate than what awaits me in Cainhurst. But you don't share that, do you? You answer to the Church."

"I mean… well, the Kegs don't mind 'em much, but in a roundabout way, yeah."

"What would they do to you?"

"Hey, hey, I don't know, all right? It's not like the Church is short on punishment ideas or anything. Maybe whatever happened to that one Byrgenwerth bloke'll happen to me." He shifts uncomfortably at the thought of being scooped up by the Choir. Not even their elixirs could make him numb enough to endure whatever grisly event they would have planned. "Still, even if it does, I'm just one Hunter. Even if they off me, guarantee you it won't stop there. Executioners are like to get involved, 'specially with the Vileblood and all. From what I heard, Logarius is one bloke you do not want knocking on your door, and that's not even getting into how cross the Holy Blade'll be that all this's happening right under his nose."

"I don't want to think about Logarius. I don't want to think about Ludwig, either. Or the Executioners." Jaws clenched, she brings her fingers to her temples and squeezes her eyes shut. "This is so… so… complicated," she says, seething the word like it's a dark and bitter curse.

"You think so? I mean, sure, I don't know all there is 'bout Cainhurst, but I know enough. I know you're safe here." Jamison takes a tentative step closer to the hearth, a strange tightness tucked behind his breastbone. "Well, for the most part, anyhow. The Church likes sticking its nose where it don't belong and Yharnam's not some shining example of civility or anything, but you said yourself it's better than the Knights that'll be after you. 'Sides, anybody wanting to kill you here'll have to go through me first. I'll blast 'em all to smithereens."

She opens one eye, faint amusement in her smile. "Not to discredit you, dear Hunter, but you seem a little less intimidating at present."

"Gimme my clothes back, then," he says.

"Mm, I don't think so."

Jamison licks the pad of his thumb, the tang of metal lingering on his tongue. "I could take 'em off you. Buttons's much easier than laces, right?"

"You wouldn't." A mischievous glint lurks in the gold of her eyes.

"With you looking like that, I bloody well might."

"And how is that, if I may ask?"

"Crash hot." His heartbeat drums painfully in his throat. "I think I like you better in that than those fancy knickers of yours."

Concealing a surreptitious smirk behind her prosthetic hand, Satya turns herself toward the warmth of the fire. Her body language shifts back into a still, impassive calm, her legs straight and posture rigid. "This is awfully complicated, too, isn't it."

He frowns, quite sobered by her response. "What?"

"Our situation. It's complicated. It was complicated from the night I met you, and has been increasingly complicated every night since. It has been an… interesting experience so far, all things considering." She idly traces the blood gem in her palm with the polished face of a crimson fingernail, attention devoured by the dancing flame. "I suppose I should have realized my initial expectations were unreasonable. We never could have upheld them. Not with how we are."

"'How we are'?" He makes a face. "How are we, then?"

"You know how. Something less than human."

Bereft of the moonstone hidden in his (her) trouser pocket, his metal fingers work into the black material of the waistcoat instead. "Didn't think all that was such a bad thing, you know."

"It isn't," she says. "Not necessarily. I didn't mean it in that way, if that's how you took it. This is just… difficult. It's difficult for me to categorize this now. I don't think I can use 'companions in the crudest sense' anymore."

"Well… you could. If you wanted. Not like anyone's here to stop you." An uncomfortable tightness screws between his lungs. Whatever their (completely, utterly farcical) acquaintanceship has become, surely it isn't a cause for stress? "Stuff like that never really mattered much to me. It's whatever you want it to be, and if whatever you want's 'companions in the crudest sense,' then, well, that's what it is, innit?"

She cranes her neck to glance at him from her shoulder. "Does that bother you?"

"Not really." He gives a noncommittal shrug. "I'm just here for the hunting."

Nodding absently in agreement, she begins to tap on her knuckles again. "Even if I could call it that, companions, it's more than simple categorization. It's what happens next."

"Sleep, probably," he says, scratching his belly.

"In a procedural sense," she amends.

"All right. A piss, then sleep. Then another Hunt tomorrow if they call for one. If they don't, I want one of them pies they're hocking near Yharnam Square."

Satya affords him a long look.

"What? You said procedural! Ain't that procedural?"

"The crux of the problem is," she says, a slight smile at the side of her mouth, "I hate when I don't know what is going to happen. When I left Cainhurst, I had a perfect system in place. My departure was all done according to plan. I spent months arranging it. My residence in the Forbidden Woods was intentional. Is intentional. Straying from my usual place during the night of the Hunt was not, and everything has spiraled down this bizarre path ever since."

Satya continues to trace the metal of her left hand. Her gaze flicks back to the hearth, focused on the blanched fossils crumbling in its blackened maw, and it occurs to him now, perhaps belatedly, that even with all of her research and preparation, her place here in Yharnam is something markedly forced, yet new—and it further occurs to him, very much belatedly, that whatever sort of bond she has formed with him might yet be new for her as well.

He grimaces at himself. So much for behaving.

"I met a very unusual Hunter that evening, you know," she says, her voice a quiet murmur over the charring ashes. "He slew a monstrous fiend and died while doing it. When he returned at the lantern, he stayed with me until morning broke. No other beast dared draw near."

Something in Jamison's chest strings taut at the recollection. He remembers the smell of wet earth, coils of damp roots, the sound of claws tearing up rocks and soil. He remembers the decaying scent of leaves decomposing on the forest floor, the thick rolls of fog in the gloam, the sight of her rising above him in blood amongst the coming dark. He remembers the lantern, its pale light pervading the stone clearing, and the shrouded woman crouched beyond the trees.

"Tell me the truth," says Satya. "Why did you spare me that night?"

Liar, liar, liar. You terrible, lying bastard.

"I told you already, you got something different in you." Jamison works his jaw, an agonizing twist coiling in the pit of his stomach. "The lantern was plenty proof, but… well, I know you would've killed me proper if that beast hadn't shown up. You kept talking 'bout sparring before, and—that's sort of what it was, I guess. Butchering beasts's just butchering. Fighting you was more than butchering."

"I see." She appraises him with a keen eye. "You felt alive, then, didn't you?"

The image of her standing over him rings clear in his mind. A blade soaked in blood drenches her hand, the creature's black ichor spattered across her cheek. Her cloak billows in the humid winds as the aurum glint of her gaze follows him into the mist. The feel of his body wringing tight with every skip, dodge, and whirl as he wielded his hammer, his cannon, and then the whirring blade of the whirligig seeps into his muscle memory; the lasting, nauseous high from overflowing adrenaline wrenches through him in a gutting spike.

"My oath I did. It was beautiful. Magnificent, even. You could've killed me if I mucked up or lost my footing or had a misfire. It's all I could think about. This posh lady in a dress with a blood rock 'bout the size of me own hand damn near obliterated me." He sucks in a deep inhale, fingers forming a tight fist in the waistcoat's fabric. "Hah. A bit of me wanted that, I think."

"You… wanted me to kill you?"

"What?" A moment ticks by before Jamison realizes what was said. "No. No, no, no. No, I—I didn't—"

"You wanted me to kill you." Satya then glances downward. "Want?"

"No. Right, look, I—I never said it was reasonable or anything," he says, heat flushing his face. He wrests the waistcoat down from his shoulder and he holds it over his growing erection. "You're just this ripper bombshell and the way you was then, I—it's just—it's the bloody rush of it, all right—"

"Is that why you asked me to bite you again?"

Jamison freezes, prosthetic hand clamped over his mouth. He does not have an answer to that. The answer is yes, but it still is not something he has.

"It appears I was correct after all. You do like biting. Baser instincts, indeed." A pleased grin captures her, and his heart skips thrice too many. "And here I thought I spent all this time misreading you."

"Misreading? What, you taking notes or something?" He huffs noisily between his fingers, willing the stiffness between his legs to hurry up and bugger off already, but his body seems to have other ideas.

"No. Just a good memory. For some things, at least." Her fangs sink against her lower lip as she regards him. "I will have to keep this in mind."

He bites at the inside of his cheek. That could mean a lot of things. A lot of things. Things he probably shouldn't be thinking about right now, especially so mired in his current predicament. His pulse pounds beneath his ribs and his face is hot and there is a very strange amalgam of embarrassment and desire spread thick over him like tar.

For gods' sake, he just got finished.

Gripping the waistcoat with white knuckles, he slinks over toward the table and plops himself down in the chair furthest from the fireplace (and her), his heavy coat still slung over its back. A part of him considers retreating to the bed, but with the bloody linens rucked up in a right mess, there would be very, very little with which to hide himself. The waistcoat will have to do for now.

"For the water closet, you said the third door on the left beyond the bottom of the stairs, correct? I would rather not accidentally surprise anyone."

Jamison redirects his attention to her, hands plastered over the tent in his lap. Satya still stands by the heated sanctuary of the hearth as she tries her best to smooth and flatten out his shirt's copious wrinkles, half-poised as if she had meant to leave several moments ago but instead became engrossed with the impossible task of making the fabric somehow pristine. He finds himself grinning dumbly at the thought. She really does look nice in his clothes, he thinks, even if they are far too big.

Satya casts him a questioning glance mid-flatten. "Mister Fawkes?"

"Hm?" It's a reflexive noise more than anything.

"The… third door on the left?"

It occurs to him that he should probably know what she's talking about. "Uh, what about it?"

"The water closet. Is that where it is?"

"Oh," he says, and then, "Oh! Right, right, should be, yeah. If it's not, could always ask McCree. Real nosy bastard, but he usually don't mind helping."

Appearing partly displeased about having to relent in her wrinkle struggle, she pivots from the fireplace and approaches the table with even steps. Her prosthetic fingers skim across its surface, skipping over discarded pouches and spindles of aurum jewelry, and when she slows to take pause by where he sits, she laces her hands together and regards him with what he can only construe as fondness.

"It seems you don't mind, either," she says.

Jamison swallows, suddenly feeling quite lost. "I don't—what?"

"I never thanked you. Well, I suppose I did threaten you as a form of thanks, but somehow I don't think that carries the same weight in sincere gratitude as an actual thank you."

"For—for what?" He doesn't want to say for sex, because that would—well, truth be told, he would just really rather not be thanked for something like that—

"For helping," she says, and there is a modicum of relief. "For keeping me hidden. For letting me stay in the city with you while the forest is being scoured. For letting me drink."

Slowly, she reaches out and lets her right hand settle over the column of his neck. Her movements are slight, but the pad of her thumb draws a soft, feathery circle around the mark she'd made. Shivers burrow up his spine and warm through his nerves. It's deliberate, he knows; there's no way it couldn't be, not with how close she is, not with how she lifts the pressure over each incision. Fuck, if he weren't hard already, that alone would have him stiff in a heartbeat.

"Weren't no trouble," he says, voice entombed in gravel. "All part of the job, innit?"

"I realize that. It still doesn't negate the fact that I have never properly thanked you for all you've done." As if sensing his discomfort, her hand then drifts down to the knob of his shoulder and gives a gentle squeeze. "It's… difficult, I suppose, getting used to all of this. To Yharnam. To the Vileblood. Being away from Cainhurst. Needing. Everything has all become so chaotic. I forget myself sometimes."

"I know." He lifts his left hand from his lap. Hesitantly, he brings it up to his shoulder, gauging her countenance, and then rests it over top of hers. "It was a long time ago for me, yeah, but… still. I know."

"Thank you, Mister Fawkes," she says.

"My pleasure." Jamison catches her gaze and offers a grin.

Satya returns it. It isn't restrained or forced; soft crinkles flank her eyes, and she hums a quiet noise of approval. Her hand shifts beneath his palm, rubbing gently into the thick muscle of his shoulder, and it's almost enough to make him groan.

She is so far beyond what he deserves, and it hurts.

"I will be back shortly," she says, "provided I can actually find another set of linens. I don't know about you, but I am in sore need of rest."

The mere mention of sleep kicks at his yawn reflex. Exhaustion waters his eyes. "Don't need to tell me twice. I'm rooted. Feels like I could sleep for days."

"Days is starting to sound very tempting." She lets go of his shoulder, snags the room's key from the tabletop, and starts toward the door. "Not that I expect any rash behavior, but if I don't return in twenty minutes, you may have to put on that waistcoat."

Her steps creaking over the floorboards grate at his thoughts as he mulls over the meaning of her words. His waistcoat? What? Why wouldn't she—?

"Wait, wait, wait! Hang on, hang on," he says, and before he can stop himself, he's clambering for the soft brown leather pouches lying upon the table. He opens the flap of the first and digs inside, frantic and flustered and hoping, but only a cluster of quicksilver bullets greets him. He bites at his tongue, shoving the pouch away, and he wrenches the other open with equal haste. When his prints touch the familiar chill of smooth silver beside the point of an empty syringe, he knows he's found what he's looking for.

Triumphant, he holds out a tiny bell to her in the valley of his palm.

Satya starts back toward him, regarding the device with a wrinkled brow. "I'm afraid I do not quite understand."

"Hunters use 'em," he says, as if that alone somehow could convey to her all of the history and connotations surrounding Hunters and bells. If he could make her listen to the great tolling at the Cathedral or the hollow tin of the Oedon Chapel, if he could have her experience the spine-skipping, heart-stirring clang of his kin raising the alarm, she might somehow understand.

Mouth drawn thin in bemusement, she stares at the bell. "Well, I can only assume Hunters use them since you have it in your possession, although I don't know for what reason. What use could a bell possibly have during a Hunt?"

He struggles to parse his feelings—they're feelings, he finds, more than actual thoughts—into words. "It's… well, it's how we hunt together. Sort of. Sometimes you can hear 'em if you listen real hard. 'Cross worlds, sometimes. Places you think you've been but never have. They all got their own voice, too. This one right here's mine. See the side?" Rolling it with his thumb, he turns it over and lets her glimpse the inner chamber of the bell. The word JUNKRAT is scratched into the wall.

That minor detail does not go unnoticed. "'Junkrat'? What is a junkrat?"

"I am," he says. "Er, well, used to be."

"And why exactly were you a junkrat?"

"No, no, no, not a junkrat," he corrects. "The Junkrat."

"That still does not tell me what a junkrat is," she says.

"It was a name from a long time ago, back when I was just a little ankle biter. Mum and Dad was still around then. Yharnam was some faraway place. Fever dreams."

Turning the silver bell about between his thumb and forefinger, he lets the delicate tinkling noise settle deep in the hollow of his chest. It's soft, soothing, and quietly picks at interred memories that have sunken so far down they might be dredged fossils.

"Hunters' bells have something special to 'em," he says. "No idea how they work, but some of me mates say it's best if you engrave it, y'know, give it a sort of… I dunno. A name or something. Make it one of a kind. Don't know why, but I thought, yeah, sure, that seems right, no harm in it. Junkrat's just the first one that came to mind."

He runs his thumb along the lip of the bell. The cool metal against his fingerprint brings an intimate sort of solace. The name he'd scrawled inside is a lost, discarded fragment from a life long gone, and while it reminds him of sickness and damage and death, it also rings of sweet summers and bright evenings and a world so very far from Yharnam's piercing spires.

Glancing up at her, he opens his palm with the bell centered on his lifelines. "If we're gonna be companions and all," he says, a foreign tightness lodged in his chest, "it's probably best you have it."

Uncertainty crosses her countenance. "I don't understand. It is clearly important to you, yet you want to give it away?"

Jamison scrubs at the back of his neck with prosthetic knuckles. "Well… we got us a pact now. I'm your Hunter. I hunt with you and kill for you, right, just like I said, but the nights get long. Real long. Heaps of things can happen on a Hunt. If I'm ever not around and trouble's gunning for you, just give that a ring. I'll come running."

Satya stares at the bell for a long moment before picking it up by the thin handle. She brings it close to her face, twisting her wrist to inspect all of the little nicks and scratches carved into its silvern waist, and then tilts it backward to look at the name he'd so painstakingly etched into the metal all those years ago.

"This calls for you," she says, but with a tinge of hesitance, as though she does not quite believe it.

He shrugs. "More or less."

"So, if I were to ring this somewhere downstairs, you'd be able to hear it?"

"Clear as a bell."

She enfolds it within her hand, amused. "And how would you know where to find me?"

"It rings, I follow. As long as it's got a noise, I got something to go after. Something 'bout being tuned. Tuned? Attuned? Whatever it was Hog called it." He leans into the chair, right arm resting upon the table. "Gotta say, though, if you give it a ring downstairs, I think I've already got a good idea where to find you."

"Bold." Her smirk is wry. "Don't worry. I will spare you the chagrin of appearing in nothing but a waistcoat."

"Oi, I don't need to answer it, you know," he says. "Just 'cause you ring don't mean I'm obligated or anything."

"This is true. But if I were somehow ambushed, how would you know the difference between a ring for help and a ring for a lark?"

Jamison musters a scowl. "Now why would you go 'bout saying that when I give you something out of the goodness of me own heart? That's not very companion-like."

Satya takes one step closer. With the bell clutched in her prosthetic fingers, she paths her right hand up from the blond trail of hair at his navel up to his belly, his ribs, his pectoral. The warmth of her palm seems to seep through his skin, sending pleasant shocks through his sternum, and when she pauses just over the mad thumping of his heart, she calmly lifts her eyes to meet his gaze.

"You are a strange man, Mister Fawkes. Hunters are killers, just as they've always been and always will be, but there is still something here." The heel of her hand presses down, molding against malleable muscle. "The goodness of your heart," she says. "There is a little left, isn't there? Otherwise you would have killed me that night."

He finds that his breath has become increasingly short. "No way I could've killed you."

"I don't retreat to the Dream," she says.

"Doesn't matter. You're better."

Skepticism knits her brow. "I don't know if that is supposed to be a truth or a compliment."

"Both," he says, and he means it.

"You are the most formidable opponent I've faced. What makes you think you couldn't?"

"I tried everything short of throwing my bloody cannon at you and still carked it."

"Your death wasn't my doing. Poison is not my weapon of choice."

"Yeah, I know," he says, his voice far too hoarse; oh, he laments it; "but if it'd been much longer, I still would've been on the ground, just with one of your pretty blades in my gut instead."

Satya remains silent. Her black hair cascades down her shoulders and the gold of her eyes scintillates in the firelight. The heat of her hand remains planted overtop his heart, and it feels as though roots have grown from her lifelines and plunged through him to constrict around the wildly pumping chambers earthed in his chest.

"I don't understand you," she says. The bell has found its way into her trouser pocket, and her prosthetic hand now coasts up the length of his cheekbone. "You are ruthless while you hunt. Mad. Beastly. Unhinged. You slaughter and butcher like the Church commands, and you must lock all of it away afterward like any good Hunter. And yet, for all your brazen humor and murderous delirium, it seems there is still a touch of humanity left in you after all."

Jamison sinks his teeth into his tongue because saying thanks to you would be too blunt, too candid, too far beyond his station. He should not want this catastrophic and unattainable thing, and yet he sits here, feeble and afflicted, too still for fear of spurning the coursing burn of affection she somehow seems so willing to give.

Is it the human in him that hurts? he wonders, hands clasped tight. He can't remember.

"I can feel your heart. It is such a wild, ferocious creature. It's little wonder you've become a Hunter." Her stare meets his, laden with discernable interest. "Regardless, out of all the things that could have happened, of all the possibilities and paths that could have been—being tracked by your brethren, slain by beasts, left to fend for myself until morning—I am glad it was you who found me that night."

A wreath of pleasure coils beneath the pressure of her hand, and he finds himself shivering in its warmth. "So am I."

The hand centered upon his heart glides up to frame his jaw. Jolts of frisson prickle down the back of his neck as she leans in, her hair draping down across the ridge of his clavicle. The body heat soaked in her prosthetic fingers unfurls along his skin at his cheek, his ear; the sheer heat of the blood gem in her palm feels as though it might scorch him in a fiery brand. Her lips press to the tip of his nose—please, let her kiss him again; let her tease his lip with her fangs and bring him apart—and she then releases him to melt against the back of the chair, limp and languid.

"I will be back shortly. Do try to behave in the meantime." She eyes the still-tented waistcoat strewn upon his lap with a hint of mischief. "I realize that may be difficult, but I'm certain you'll manage."

Jamison feels somehow dazed, as if her touch alone could drain the very life from him and leave him a languishing husk. He wants to catch her by the wrist and pull her on top of him; he wants to grip her by the thighs and bite her shoulder and have her moan into his neck, his shirt half-buttoned and unlaced trousers slipping off her hips, but that opportunity has long since passed.

Instead, he cracks a wide grin and settles by drawing two diagonal lines across his heart. "No worries, love. I'll be on me best behavior."

Her smile shouldn't make him feel like he's been dipped in fire.

When the door closes behind her and her measured steps fade down the corridor, Jamison releases a heavy exhale and rests his head against his coat, eyes wide to the ceiling. While his erection is starting to subside, there is still an aching twinge that lingers a little too long for his liking, and he starts to wonder if he's going to be forever doomed to have a hard on in her presence.

Well… there are worse problems to have, he supposes. Like his heart throwing a right fit when she so much as looks at him (and that hasn't happened before, it hasn't, he's sure of it), like his thoughts buggering off in the middle of a sentence because her smile proved too distracting, or like his body answering to her touch with an overwhelming eagerness he has not experienced in a long, long time.

But it could be worse. It could. He could be roped up in a clinic, for one. He could be in the Choir's hands, or in the grasp of the Executioners and their bloodthirsty lot. The Captain could interrogate him about his crimes with a Vileblood, or he could be left to face Mako's surly wrath, which would surely include him waking in the Dream with flowers up his nose one too many times. He could also be drunk, blood addled, mindless, stalking down the streets and splitting open doors with his hammer and smashing the skulls of innocents, seeing fur and fangs where there are none at all.

So, really, in the grand scheme of things, this isn't quite so bad. Not that he prefers to be practically paralyzed after a soft kiss on the nose or hearing her whisper his name or experiencing any of the glorious things she can do with her mouth, but it does beat the alternatives. There are far worse indulgences to feed than sex.

But this indulgence wasn't just sex, was it?

Jaws clenched at the thought, Jamison lifts himself from the chair. He lets the waistcoat pool to the floor at his feet, and he passes it by as he crosses the room to stand before the hearth and its dying resident. He stoops to a kneel, metal knee settled onto the wooden floorboards, and tosses another log onto the ashen bed of smouldering coals with a generous fist of tinder. Licks of orange fire devour the feathery splinters with voracity, and soon the flames surge into a healthy light once more.

Perhaps it should bother him that his first thought is of her approval, but he is too steeped in the memory of her pressed against him to care.

Jamison is no stranger to indulgence. Hunters as a singular entity are no strangers to indulgence, either. He has given in to the bestial howl that burrows up from his vocal cords and let its staggering strength consume his corporeality; he has submerged himself in bottles of spirits and blood and dubious liquids with the promise of relief; he has had the air exhumed from his lungs as experimental creatures born of milky eyes twisted after him; he has had men and women grip his shoulders and claw his back and bite his throat—but none of them like her.

(Oh, her—why her? Why is it her?)

But perhaps that is all it was. Yharnam is a pit of hedonistic debauchery, the riding crop of the Church aside; this kind of thing isn't uncommon (but not with Vilebloods, not with Cainhurst; you poor, miserable, lying bastard). Would it really be so bad if that's all this was? There are strings attached, of course, but he is a Hunter, and she is both born of noble blood and marked an enemy of the Healing Church. If she'd thought he only wanted her for the sheer carnality his ilk feeds upon, would that truly be such a bad thing?

He mulls on it, his left hand settled over the mark on his neck as he watches the flames contort and writhe. It's… probably for the best, isn't it? Her thinking that.

Minutes pass, and it isn't long before his left knee starts to complain. He forces himself to his feet again, intent on heading back to the chair to wait, but the distinct flare of brilliant sunlight peering through the threadbare shroud over the window snags his attention. It occurs to him then that the violent downpour must have stopped at some point, although he does not remember when.

Squinting through the thin red curtains, he worries at his lower lip and watches the sun ply tired thunderheads in two. Soft colors of dawn split the sky, bright and beautiful and blinding. Yharnam's stretching spires stand like glistening needles in morning's wake. Distant thunder echoes over the dripping rooftops, whispering down crooked stoops and draining alleyways, followed closely by the sonorous, tolling bells of the Grand Cathedral.

That familiar ring resonates in every Hunter: the Captain has turned in his badge, and the night's Hunt is at an end.

Jamison pivots on his quicksilver heel and reaches out for his coat. It still lies draped upon his wooden chair over his hat, lank and heavy. He snags it by the collar and gives it a swift shake. No rainwater drops to the floorboards thanks to the residual heat from the hearth, but it still carries a thick, palpable damp in its threads. It might yet be a while until it fully dries.

With a strange pang wedging under his left rib, he lifts up his coat and drapes it over the curtain rod. It takes a moment or two of adjustment before it stops slipping, but once he knots one of the sleeves around the strip of black iron to keep it secure, it settles nicely over the dilapidated drapes, effectively blocking out the glare of the sun. The only remaining light in the ramshackle room lingers in red fists of kindled firewood and the guttering flame of the bedside oil lamp.

Still, I'm glad for the sun. Even if it doesn't always agree with me, I enjoy it nonetheless.

He works prosthetic knuckles into the space above his heart. "Might make it bearable, at least."

Fatigue pulls at his limbs and sinks over his shoulders as he makes his way back to the chair. The night must have truly been long for him to feel so weary. He can't place why, but it feels as if it's been much longer than before. Is his sense of time going, too?

Before he can sit, the floorboards give in a methodical creak somewhere out in the corridor. He recognizes that cadence as clear as a chiming bell; he'd know it anywhere, anywhere, as if it were a rune worked into his very being—and his body shivers in a tremor of pleasure at the prospect of her return. The sensible part of him knows that shouldn't happen, either—none of this should have happened, none of it at all—but the rest of him is unabashed in his enjoyment of her because if he can't enjoy something in this godsforsaken place, what is the bloody point of his warped immortality?

Satya shuts the door behind her. Her lustrous hair is combed down one shoulder, a rich lake over the front of his shirt, her countenance brought alive by the warm glow of the hearth. A set of pristine white linens lies captured between her arms, and when she glances toward the shielded window, he can't help but notice her smile.

This is bad. It is. All of it. Common sense, really.

But that has never stopped him from doing anything before, now, has it?