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You Only Live Twice

[Julian x MC/Julian x Reader, Masquerade.]

By the look on his face and the thieve’s glee in his grin, Julian has decided to steal Lucio’s once-birthday party for his own. He is newly risen, reborn. The two of you stand at the beginning of something new: a life he has only chosen to return to because he intends to spend it with you. 

(He came back for you. The beat of his heart is for you.) 

“The Hanged Man and his Undead Bride walk into a Masquerade,” Julian proclaims, throwing his arms wide and flashing you a saucy grin from behind his beaked mask. “It sounds like the beginning of a ghost story.” 

“The once-dead-duo,” you concur, slipping your hand into his. (The both of you have come back from a place so few souls return from; you are a ghost story and a romance both.) “And who are we haunting?” 

“No one,” Julian replies. “Or maybe everyone. We’re the kind of ghosts that skulk in dust-covered ballrooms, our comings and goings announced by the clinking of raised flutes of champagne, or the rustle of silks. We are ghosts of opulence. We linger because we are too merry to unclench our fists from life’s pleasures.” 

You press your grin to his throat, press a kiss to his skin, and these words like a prayer against the fine bones of his collar: “Let’s make the most of it.” 

Julian hums in agreement, loops his arm around your waist and pulls you tighter against him. 

“You know what they say—you only live twice, right?” 

From now on everything will be split lips and scraped knees; again, and again, Julian will offer you the pale and finely sculpted skin of his throat as readily as he offered it to the noose, but when you take his pulse under your lips you will take it gently, kindly, and more tenderly than the rope that tried (and failed) to take him from you. Again and again, a pledge unto your tomorrows, Julian will sink to his knees and offer you his miraculous, still-beating heart and—as it has already stopped once (his fragile heart has been through so much)—you will take it from him and guard it with a ring of poison-tipped spears, sharp as raven claws, ready to defend him against all that would seek to wound him. 

It is a task you have already set yourself to: mere hours ago you protected it from the bright flashing steel of Quaestor Valdemar’s scalpel. For the rest of your second-life you will devote yourself to its stewardship, its guardianship.

(The fitful way Julian’s body had twitched as he reanimated, lurched into life, off the vivisection table and into your embrace: 

“It—it is you, right? I’m not… I’m not dead? It worked?” 

“Yes. It’s me. I’m here. Everything is alright. You’re alive—” 

And you had seized one another, wound your limbs around each other as tightly as ivy clings to a tree, and you held his sagging body until his strength and breath both returned to it, feeling the miraculous and frantic hammering of his heart in his chest.) 

After all this you are now (at last!) a matching pair, a ghoulish set, two of a kind: unnatural things. So strange and peculiar, the twists of fate that have brought you back together: the two of you alone have tasted death and turned back to life, have walked through the scald of infernal fires to return to each other’s embrace. Even Death was not strong enough to stand between you; the thought is as dizzying as it is delightful.

Or is that dizzying influence Julian himself? As he ushers you up the stairs and into the palace, bedecked in shining black feathers and red silk, his hand on the small of your back is a firm and constant pressure; he holds you so close to his side that your feet barely touch the ground as he whisks you into the palace—transformed, phantasmagoric—vibrant and merry and full of life, rich life, rushing life. The crowd surges, bubbles with laughter and cries of mirth, all muffled behind a menagerie of artful masks both magnificent and ghastly. But are those many masks less gruesome than your faces, which have known the grey and still repose of necrosis and yet still curve in insatiable smiles?

(Julian had looked so uncommonly somber after the gallows had taken him, his mouth a grim line, but now the curve of his grin hardly leaves his face: “You’re alive, you’re alive!”) 

All has been lost; all has been recovered. From now on none of it will be squandered. You will kiss him ‘til your lips are cracked and dry. You will love him until your second death rattle, until the music swells and the curtain falls and Death comes back to claim what it should have kept. 

You float like a spirit, like a spectre through curtains of blushing and billowing voile (sunset pink and dusk purple; the orange of a bright new dawn) and it stirs as you and Julian pass. The colored lights seem to shine brighter when Julian stands beneath them. His breath is warm against your ear when he bends to whisper against it; the flutter of his pulse is a drumbeat calling you to dance. 

The both of you are built of nothing if not second chances. You are a pair of oysters hiding a second pearl beneath your tongues. You are an Indian summer, a blue moon, a blackberry winter. When the purple juices run sweet and syrupy down your fingers, Julian takes them into his mouth and licks them clean. Second pearl, second act; the second being the more lovely of the two, for now you and Julian are twinned, together. 

There is no more time nor space to wonder if you are merely a shades, echoes of your former selves. If slipping back and forth through the mortal veil has left you bereft of something it is long gone, now lost, and it will go unlooked for. What concern is it, if you are both left slightly broken from your feats of resurrection? There is nothing but gold in the cracks where your souls shattered. Giddy ghouls, the both of you, lording over your dragon hoard of stolen treasures: sunlight, stories, stolen time and love, love, love. 

Living bodies in need of nourishment, take every sweet confection on your tongue! Warm-blooded flesh of the living, seize for yourselves every pleasure! Let your appetites go unsated no more, for you have known what it is to die with regret. (You will take the pink flesh of the lobster from Julian’s fingers when he offers it to you; you will curl your finger into the rich, creamy dip and offer him the tip and he will take the whole digit into his mouth, watching you behind his mask, hollowing his cheeks around your finger.) 

Break your ankles, tripping on the dishware on the tables: you have tasted death, and yet you breathe. If you fall, Julian will catch you; if you break, he will carry you. 

“Oh, this song! I love this song!” 

He takes you into his arms; you dance through your entr’acte. He sweeps you across dance floors, up onto tables: you are a pair of wilis, clawing your way out of premature graves, to dance with lost lovers beneath skies as dark as grave dirt. Your soul has flown back to foreign flesh; you do not know how you came back, but you are sure that you, too, came back for him. You are rejoined, in this body you stole so that you might return to him. 

And the laugh that shakes through you when he seizes the vielle and draws the bow over it’s strings—has a banshee’s cackling ever sounded so fair? 

Once you were not even a cadaver—naught but ash—your spirit shielded in the cold and humid halls of your long-dead ancestors, beneath burial mounds and ancient barrows of green grass, a glum and frozen afterlife before you were snatched back. And all those years—resurrected—waiting to be thrust back into his arms. 

Welcome back, welcome home, my merry heart, my once-dead love. 

The memories of that old life still stretch like a chasm behind you, but that loss seems so little in comparison to what you have gained. All that darkness is no match to the light Julian shines into you, and even at his lightest touch you sparkle like dew in the bright gold of the dawn. Something within you is unleashed, now, and it is hungry. 

Asra claims that the knowledge you now hold like a precious gem (a secret in the notch of your throat) used to destroyed you. The man you once called ‘master’ says that every time he revealed the truth to you—you were dead, naught but ash; I dug until my fingers bled—it fractured you beyond repair. But this truth no longer holds that power over you, and the knowledge of your death is but the tiniest pinprick of an ache behind your eyes. 

This much has changed: you are a half-formed thing, summoned back from the grave and the cold halls of your long-dead ancestors by necromancy and other unhallowed arts, but now, you are not alone. 

(After all, is that not how Frankenstein’s monster sought to be placated? He wished only to be given a mate. To be, in his grotesque and gruesome afterlife, a little less lonely. ) 

You were swollen fruit fallen to the earth too soon—but in the spot where you fell blooms something green and lush and full of promises. 

“The Hanged Man and his Undead Bride walk into a Masquerade.” It sounds like the beginning of a story, like the one the masked revelers tell as they seat on plush cushions crowded around low tables: tales traded over card games. And what is more quickening—the touch of Julian’s hand on your thigh beneath the table, or the feel of the stolen card he passes to you, distracting the other players as you slip it into your hand and win the round? 

(What’s cheating at cards, when you’ve both cheated death?) 

From now on, for every conspiracy of ravens, you will leave meat scraps and red ribbon, tokens of gratitude undying. Every flash of black-feather a reminder of the gift that brought him back to you, a boon from one of the Arcana to whom you will always be indebted. 

(The Hanged Man allowed him safe passage into death and then back to life, the way so few souls travel. You are a blue moon, Julian, just look at you: shining bright and fat and full and all the more radiant in your rarity.) 

And so an answer comes to the question: ‘What becomes of a plague doctor after the plague?’ 

He becomes the love of your after-life. 

He is the fulcrum around which your double-life has pivoted. The hard work of beginning, again. You are oysters with two pearls clenched between your folds; life crashes over you, and you both let the current carry you out to sea. 

You are a pair of merry thrives, straight out of the beloved tales Julian tells, and your quarry is time. You are a pair of children stealing biscuits and jam and staining our chins with the evidence of your plunder. Every day, every dawn, you will blink into wakefulness beside Julian in the thrall of a warmth your bodies have no right to still be creating: precious, stolen. 

You are a pair of draugr, a dyad of liches, cloaked in guises far fairer than they have any right to be. The undead should not dare to look this fair! It is an affront to God himself, the sparkling, ebullient, life on Julian’s face. 

(In his second life he looks more alive, with the flush of drink and merriment in his cheeks, and the purple bags beneath his eyes less dark, and the grin on his face—! ) 

(You will laugh at God a little longer.) 

Perhaps you are only dopplegangers, dolls, shades, shadow selves—what does that matter, if you are in love? 

And when you both die—when you return to your graves (left abandoned like unmade beds)—you will do so quietly, without protest. Without regrets. 

I did it right, this time. I loved, and I loved, deeply and without reservation: I held nothing back and I was loved so well in return. 

Whatever you are—half formed things, perhaps—together, you are complete.