mastershakeme
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The suit was from the drama department. Lucien had found it on a midnight excursion through the performing arts building, slipping through a window that someone had left unlatched (or that he’d unlatched, Eli didn’t ask), and returning to Caldwell with two garment bags over his arm and the expression of a man who had opinions about costuming and had just been vindicated. “This one is yours,” Lucien said, laying the first bag on the bed. “Black. Slim fit. The drama department has surpri
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Eli woke up hungry. Not human hungry. Not the dining-hall, apple-in-the-pocket hunger he’d known his whole life. This was different. This was total, cellular, a hunger that lived in every part of his body at once and that the body understood, even if the mind was still catching up. The world had changed around the hunger: he could hear heartbeats through walls, could smell blood through skin, could feel the pulse of every living thing in the building like a map drawn in heat. He was ly
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The room was dark. Eli didn’t turn on the lamp. The light from the campus lamps outside came through the window in pale strips, enough to see by, enough to see the shapes of the room he’d been living in since September: the desk, the books, the window seat with the blanket. The bed with its single pillow, the one Eli had left behind when the Vespers moved him into the house because it belonged to Lucien and he’d refused to let them take that too. The Halloween card on the desk, the cartoon
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Lucien handled the bodies while Eli slept. Eli didn’t ask for details. He didn’t want details. What he knew was this: he fell asleep in his room at Caldwell House (not Vesper House, never Vesper House again, Lucien had carried his things back through the dark while the campus slept) and when he woke at seven in the morning with pale February sunlight coming through the window, Lucien was on the window seat with a book and the expression of someone who had spent the night doing something phy
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I get that. The possessiveness was definitely intentional. A lot of the fantasy for me was that feeling of being wanted that intensely, so it didn’t bother me the way it might bother some readers. I know it won’t work for everyone, though.
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Eli looked away. He’d thought he wouldn’t. He’d spent weeks imagining this moment, hardening himself into someone who could watch what needed to happen and stay standing. He’d thought the anger would be enough. The fury at the files and the word “suitable” and the forty-seven students and J. Moreno’s photograph and the boy in the new file eating dinner alone somewhere on this campus. He’d thought the fury would carry him through. It didn’t. Lucien began with Rémy because Rémy had
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The Counter-Litany took thirty minutes. Eli spoke all two hundred and twelve phrases. The chapel shook around him. The candles died and relit and died. The air thickened and thinned in waves, the binding resisting the unraveling phrase by phrase. And phrase by phrase, it lost. Eli’s voice didn’t waver. The pronunciation didn’t slip. Lucien was in his chest through the bond, steadying him, the second mind anchoring the first, feeding precision into every syllable. The words came out of
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Nora and Sasha were downstairs. Eli could hear them through the floor with the crystalline precision the third exchange had given him: Sasha’s voice, arguing about something, the specific cadence she used when the argument was recreational rather than genuine. Nora’s quieter responses. The clink of Nora’s tea against a saucer, the scratch of Nora’s pen in a notebook, the particular rhythm of a person who kept track of things even when the things she was keeping track of were falling apart.
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He got out on Sunday night. Not through a gap in the surveillance this time. Through a decision. Eli stood up from the guest room bed at midnight, put on his coat, walked downstairs, and left through the front door. Nora was on watch. She was in the sitting room with a book and a cup of tea, and she looked up when Eli’s footsteps hit the bottom stair, and their eyes met, and Eli saw the calculation happen on her face: the weighing, the measuring, the moment where Nora Collier decided w
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Two days under watch. The surveillance was seamless. Not oppressive, not dramatic, not the locked-door-and-guard version that Eli would have found easier to resist because resistance was simple when the cage was visible. This cage was invisible. This cage was Phoebe asking if he wanted to walk to class together. This cage was Nora appearing with coffee at 7 AM and staying to chat about the archive digitization project that they both knew was no longer the reason for anything. This cage was
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The bond told him before the text did. Tuesday morning. Eli was in Wexler’s seminar, halfway through a discussion about state power and legitimacy, when the frequency in his chest changed. Not the warm, steady hum he’d grown accustomed to. A spike, sharp and urgent, carrying something specific from Lucien’s end: alarm. Not pain. Not hunger. Something colder and more focused, a sudden alertness that made Eli’s own pulse jump. Through the bond, Eli felt it in fragments. Not images. Not s
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They were three weeks into the Counter-Litany practice, and Eli was getting good. Not adequate. Not passable. Good. Lucien had said so, two nights ago, the word delivered with the specific reluctance of someone who rationed praise the way other people rationed expensive wine: sparingly, deliberately, and with the full expectation that the recipient would understand the cost of the offering. Tonight they were in section six. Eli’s room at Caldwell, past midnight, the campus silent under
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Sadie didn’t call first. This was how Eli knew it was bad: Sadie always called first. Sadie was the person who texted u alive? before showing up, who gave warning, who respected Eli’s carefully maintained distance because she understood, better than anyone, that sometimes the distance was what kept him standing. Sadie not calling meant Sadie had decided that the standing was less important than the seeing, and the seeing required the element of surprise, because if she called, Eli would per
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The Counter-Litany practice had become the rhythm of their nights. Lucien on Eli’s bed, back against the wall, legs crossed, a book in his lap that he wasn’t reading because his attention was on Eli. Eli at the desk with his notebook, the phonetics written in columns, each phrase annotated with Lucien’s corrections from the previous session. The room dark except for the desk lamp, which threw a cone of warm light that stopped at Lucien’s knees and left the rest of him in shadow, the silver
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You didn’t wrongly assume it! The cell was part of what kept him contained, but it isn’t the entire binding. Getting out of the cell doesn’t mean he’s completely free yet. There are still limits on how far he can go, and that gets explained soon. 👀
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The Counter-Litany started like this: Lucien’s voice in the dark, saying a phrase Eli didn’t understand, and Eli saying it back. Except tonight, Lucien’s voice was wrong. Not wrong in pronunciation. Wrong in strength. The precision was there, the placement of each syllable, but the volume was thinner, the resonance diminished, and Eli could see why in the dim glow of his phone: Lucien’s hands were tremoring again. The shaking he’d stopped doing after the first feeding was back, fine an
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I like the criminal answer!
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He went on a Wednesday afternoon, while Lucien was at his weakest. Not to visit Lucien. To go past him. The archive was thirty feet down the corridor from Lucien’s cell, and Eli had been descending through the chapel trapdoor every night for weeks. Today he went during daylight, when the chapel was empty and the Vespers were in class or at Vesper House, and he moved through the nave quickly, opened the trapdoor, and went down the stairs with purpose rather than anticipation. He could f
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Oopsy 😂😂
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Let's say yes!
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Yes, enhanced is a better word 😂
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It doesn't. It just makes them... better humans 😂
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Not yet. Tomorrow 😊
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The campus came back to life in stages. Maintenance first, the week before classes, the groundskeepers clearing snow from the paths, the dining hall reopening on a full schedule, the library restaffing. Then the students, arriving in cars and shuttles, carrying bags and pillows and the particular exhausted relief of people returning to a place that wasn’t home but felt like something close to it. By Sunday afternoon, Caldwell House had voices in the halls again, and the silence Eli had live
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I really don't do well with criticism. I take it as failure and feel awful and implode 😂 yes for the most part people on here have been so supportive! I'm very grateful for everyone that reads and participates!
