Author's Note: This is inspired in equal parts by ReaperRain's Pandemonuim and Crisium's Red and absolutely demanded to be written.
Silence
*
Lucien Lachance has had more names than he cares to remember, so many shapes and faces there are days when he barely recognizes his own in the mirror. He has slept with scores of women—a few of which have survived the use of the name his mother gave him—but none who can claim to be his lover.
Lucien is not a sentimental man. He has masqueraded as a mark's lost lover enough times to know nostalgia can be deadly. But he knows something is missing. A cherry stone of discontent has lodged itself in his perfect, silent void and Lucien feels it like the edges of the blades he keeps against his skin.
And so when he slips into a prospective sister's room to find her waiting for him with wide eyes and a blackened heart, Lucien is ever so slightly unnerved to find his void suddenly complete. There is a knowledge though in her eyes as she waits for him to speak comforting in its kinship. An unfortunate half-breed, too human and mer to pass for either one, she has seen and done enough to understand his mind without question. He finds the quiet knowledge soothing and smiles, relaxing into the face he has been avoiding in the mirror.
"I was expecting you," she says, and her voice does not break the silence so much as fill it. "The Morag Tong came to me with an offer. You'll find his body in Hircane's Grove if you haven't already."
Lucien knows then without question that this woman will be his Silencer. And when the blade above his heart is gone and there is nothing left to say that can be said about the Night Mother, it pains him to disappear into the night. He pauses a moment outside the tiny inn, cloaked in shadows with his back pressed against the cold stone as the void tears open again, loosing bad memories and long dead to pick at him with talons he cannot fend off.
The noise is deafening.
For weeks he exists in a perpetual cacophony of sound and constant pain, fingers tracing again and again the patters of a spell he knows will bring him no relief. It is not until he wakes one night to find her staring back at him, eyes like stars in the darkness, that the noise finally recedes.
"You sleep rather soundly for a murderer," she tells him, teeth glittering through the dark and Lucien smiles back, reaches for her without meaning to.
"Join me," he asks, his voice harsh from disuse and he realizes the last he'd spoken was to her.
She rises, her clothes falling in a puddle of shadow to the cold stone floor of the fort. Lucien watches, heat in his eyes, and rises long enough to pull her down into the mattress, mouth pressed lost and locked against her own. She breaks the void as easily as skipping stones, rebuilding silence around them both with heated kisses and searching fingers through the dark. She finds the part of him he'd known he'd lost and he laughs to have it back, drowning in her.
Suddenly he knows what it is to have a lover.
And scant months later when his dead drops go awry, he knows what it is to fear. She is a terror under orders and there is not a horse alive fast enough to catch her when she flies from one false contract to the next, a trail of death and damning evidence crashing down like bits of sky in her wake. He gives her his horse, sends her to Anvil on a fleeting hope, but it is not enough. What remains of the Black Hand is attached to an unfortunately long arm and he feels with agonizing clarity the moment her soul and body part ways.
Halfway to the woods outside of Applewatch, the voices descend on him like harpies, crushing against his chest until there isn't air enough to breathe. And he can hear her voice among the dead, barely whispering forgive me, forgive me. He closes his eyes against the barrage, fists clenched around a spell, willing her to hold one, wait for me, I'll find you.
And he never hears them coming until it is far too late.