taxonomites | [location: Central | closed thread] with many a winding turn

Mr Cabal: Check the map. -SH

Sherlock Holmes, damn him, has always been too clever for anyone else's good.

Panic rises immediately in Horst's throat, all his fears and theories momentarily confirmed: someone knows the Cabal name, and they know that Horst bears it. He stares at the words Mr. Cabal for several seconds longer. This is awful.

It's a while before he settles himself again and goes through the arduous process of remembering how Sherlock told him to use the tablet, the right voice commands to open the map. It's another few seconds of looking at it before something jumps out at him that he realizes Sherlock meant him to find. A name floating around a city block in the middle of the Central district:

Johannes Cabal.

He stares at the name for a full minute longer. By this time, it's lucky that Herr Holmes didn't deliver his message in person: he'd have no doubt complained about the exceptional slowness with which Horst executed every piece of this process, the long stretches of time spent staring dumbly at things.

Or then again, if he knows Johannes Cabal, maybe he'd understand perfectly. Sometimes Horst's little brother really does invite various forms of dumbfoundedness.

He looks at the map once more, at the name, that damned name.

But a tiny voice in his head says, He came for you. This time, he came. And Horst knows he has to see for himself.

After that, he moves quickly enough that even Sherlock Holmes would call it satisfactory, gone in a soft blur.

* * * *

Horst finds his brother on the map in a little pub, the kind that sells food he'd recognize by name. He melts away into thin air and slinks through the door when someone else is exiting, and scouts the room till he finds what he's looking for: blond hair, black suit, miserably unfriendly facial expression. Well, it certainly looks like Johannes.

He stays out of sight and out of mind for the time being, watching, not sure yet of what he'll say. He'll make himself known when he chooses to.

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"It's where I prefer them," Johannes says, snippy. He has a bit of a groundhog's approach to guilt, even he's aware. When confronted, dig deeper.

He tilts his head up at the eerie white expanse of the lighthouse. It's ugly to his turn-of-the-century eye, to be sure, but it's a fascinating sort of ugly that reminds him of things he's seen described in books he's read. And not novels or travelogues, either. Sunken cities, alien cities, places he's never been and never cares to visit. It has occurred to them that they might be in one of them, but this place is a bit... orderly, for that. It sort of reminds him of Geneva. Sarnath probably wouldn't remind him of Geneva.

Distractions. Useful things. "Yes, the damned woman. I gave the damned woman back her damned soul, you know," not so much using the word in the sense of 'condemned' except perhaps in strictly literal terms. "I gave them all back. It was a bluff. To the damned Devil. Do you know, she intended to turn me in," he says with disgust, not necessarily with Leonie Barrow. "I had no idea some of those laws were on the books anywhere. She certainly did. I didn't kill her," he appends in what is perhaps the most suspicious disclaimer that ever seemed perfectly natural to Johannes Cabal. "Quite the opposite. Are we done accounting for what I've been up to on my holidays, Horst?"

Horst ignores this last question. He's in that habit, from having known Johannes so long: he just tunes out his little brother's attempts to shut down conversations with his little digs. Johannes is addicted to snide comments.

"And just what is quite the opposite of killing someone, from a necromancer's perspective?" he wonders aloud, his mind wandering a bit, as it tends to do. "Did you return Miss Barrow from the dead? Give birth to her? Did you duel her and delope? Your notions of semantics really are fascinating sometimes, little brother. I could ponder that one all evening."

But half a beat later, showing no deference to conversational graces as he usually might, he turns back to his brother and stops still, all the humor gone as quickly as it had been pasted on. "'You gave them all back.' Johannes. Did you do something selfless?"

Progress or no progress, some conversational quarry is not so easy as that. Johannes stretches his arms behind his neck and cracks his knuckles. "Does anyone really ever do anything 'selfless?'" he says in tones suspiciously philosophical, considering he's never been given to contemplating the theories of David Hume prior to this particular moment. Johannes may not actually recall which one Hume is, come to think of it. That would be typical.

He leans back against the white wall of the lighthouse and half-expects it to fry him alive or else transport him to some distant plane. It does not. He supposes, in a detached way, that he should be relieved. "I sorted it out. You know I never set upon a damned thing I can't win," he informs Horst. Then, with a smile without warmth: "Except when it comes to vampires, it would seem."

Johannes left his cane leaning against Horst's (obsolete) dinner table and his spectacles are folded up and tucked into his pocket. But for that, he looks more or less as the same as he did this morning on the Princess Hortense. The only signs to the contrary are some wrinkles in his suit jacket, the faint handprint on his face, and of course, the rate of his ever-beating human heart. "We should go," he says. "You look hungry."

Brotherhood is a complicated thing. Family... family is complicated. Things would all be so much simpler if Johannes would just volunteer deeply pertinent information like I had second thoughts about condemning innocent souls to eternal torment and decided not to go through with it. If Johannes were able to talk about his misdeeds and missteps in tones other than just defensiveness and blithe disregard, if he were able to just say I'm sorry without acting like 'sorry' was a form of profanity, he wouldn't have so much difficulty getting on with people. Most people don't have the familiarity with Johannes that Horst does, to be able to recognize his brother's avoidance tactics, or the self-protective mechanisms of his personality. They can't possibly understand him.

But then again, maybe Horst doesn't really want Johannes to learn how to get on with people after all, deep down. Maybe there's a part of him that's always liked knowing he understands Johannes better than anyone else can, a part that likes knowing he's his brother's only loyal defender. After all, it's the nature of older siblings to be protective of younger ones.

God, he doesn't know what to do with Johannes, no more than he did the last time.

I need to feed, he notices Johannes's reminder suddenly, and the hammering of his heart. Yes. "Yes, I'm hungry."

Horst blurs around to stand in front of his brother again, idly watching the pulsepoint of his throat without realizing he's doing it.

I don't know what I'm going to do with you, he wants to say. You can stay for the night, but I still haven't decided. One belated attempt to make things right doesn't undo all the things you did, you know. But I know you're sorry for what you did, even if you don't say it. And it means a great deal to know you did something to try and be a better person somehow.

Johannes, I'm glad you got your soul back. Everyone deserves the chance to care for their own spiritual well-being.

He doesn't say any of that.

Instead he says, "Let's go home," and before Johannes can protest, Horst enfolds him in a full, strong embrace.

I'm glad you're still alive. I'm glad you're here. I love you.

Horst Cabal really is terrible at holding a grudge.

It's been some years since Johannes Cabal has returned a hug from anyone but his mother and father, probably not since he was six or seven and skinned his knee or bent one of his toy men out of shape. He was never an affectionate young man. He freezes and might have indeed stood uncomfortably still through the whole experience, wondering when it was going to be over, if he didn't have the fresh memory of Horst snarling to his face: why aren't you in Hell? And the less fresh one, too, of ash all over a velvet suit.

He supposes--he supposes he can spare an embrace for his dead brother. For his brother. So he awkwardly braces his arm around Horst's back too and says over his shoulder, "Let me go, Horst," like he did earlier, not really meaning it. Horst doesn't. Johannes doesn't really expect him to.

Horst is correct: brotherhood and family are complicated. Much more complicated than Johannes can properly articulate to himself, now or ever. He shuts his eyes for a moment and thinks of saying something flip, like, Well, now that we've established we're both alive and you're probably not going to try and fix that again, I think we can-- But Horst is still very cold in the winter air. Whatever's going on, that isn't quite true.

Johannes glances up at the unnerving light from the lighthouse and curls his fingers in the shoulder of his brother's waistcoat in a tight, brief grip. He lets go again in a moment. "Come on," he mumbles under his breath. "Dawn's going to come eventually."

Edited 2013-02-25 06:55 (UTC)

[location: Central | closed thread] with many a winding turn

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