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queerregulusablack · 2 years

Text

The Magnus Archives AU, Starchaser, 1.7k words

(James POV)

His hands drew James’ eye first.

The shape of them, of course, was lovely, long fingered and elegant, with narrow palms and neatly trimmed nails. The skin he could see was pale as the rest of him, near-translucent, with blue veins peering through in snaking pastel tracks across the pronounced lines of his tendons.

What really had James staring, though, were the tattoos they were covered in.

On the back of each of his hands was a gorgeous, stylised depiction of a closed eye, inked neatly onto the skin and then surrounded in rings of more ink, almost like a mandala. James could see more closed eyes, and alchemical symbols, and in one or two places neat little spirals tucked in amongst the rest. The patterns were intricate, and beautiful, and stretched down his wrists to disappear beneath the sleeves of his jumper, and down the length of each of his long fingers.

When he lifted a hand to tuck an errant strand of long dark hair back behind his ear, James caught a glimpse of his palm, and saw it was just as heavily tattooed; but at the very centre, the eye was open, the iris inked a bright, piercing silver.

He swallowed, and readjusted his jacket to make sure his knife was covered, and then shuffled over to sit in the empty chair opposite the boy in the cafe.

There was a long moment during which James half suspected he was going to be ignored, the other not looking up from the book open in front of him, intermittently taking sips of tea from the ceramic mug on the table; before he was finally graced with the full focus of those eyes, and he half wished he’d been ignored after all.

The eyes that met him were the dark grey of a storm, and piercing. After a stretched out moment of study, the boy closed his book and sat back in his chair.

“The Hunt usually sits over there,” he intoned, nodding in the direction of a corner table - the one Marlene was sat at, ironically enough, her own knives strapped to her spine, making a very obvious show of not looking at the servant of Beholding they’d followed into the cafe - and James wet his lips and laced his fingers together on the edge of the table.

“Maybe I’m broadening my horizons,” he offered; and a corner of the boy’s mouth quirked up in an amused flicker of a smile before the expression disappeared again, and he tilted his head, examining James curiously.

He was, James admitted to himself begrudgingly, prettier than most of the would-be Avatars they crossed paths with. Servants of the Flesh were, hands down, the worst to sit across from. It was the Stranger, funnily enough, that tended to put a pretty face on its servants; too pretty, usually, wrong in the uncanny way that made chills run up your spine.

Beholding didn’t seem to care all that much. Usually its servants just looked tired. But this one was…

If James hadn’t spent years learning to see people for what they were, he would have looked twice at this boy anyway. He stood out, Korean in a predominantly white part of London, and he was just- well, pretty. Pale and lithe, his hair ink-black and falling halfway down his spine even tied loosely back in a braid. In another life, James would have been angling for his number.

In this one, he was trying to figure out if he’d crossed the line between servant and Avatar; and if he was the latter already, just how ravenous his appetite tended to be.

“Really. I was under the impression that your lot preferred to keep your horizons particularly narrow. Certainly I didn’t think you made a habit of making conversation with your meals before you partake; your friend has no interest in a chat before she sinks her teeth in.” He nodded in the direction of Marlene again, and James didn’t need to look to know what he’d likely see, that by now she was probably watching them through her jagged fringe, irises washed yellow with the anticipation of a proper hunt after weeks of tracking regular humans with no idea what they were messing with; and James grit his teeth, and set both hands on the table.

“Are you saying there’s a reason for her to put her teeth in you?” He asked, holding the grey eyes watching him in return; and there was another brief flicker of emotion across his face, amusement that was there and then gone, before he lifted his hands in a defensive gesture, palms turned toward James-

-except the irises were a bright, sickly green, and so were the boy’s eyes, and James reached for his knife only to find his wrist caught in a vice-like grip, the boy half-leaned across the table.

His eyes were back to the usual grey; and behind him, James heard Marlene yelp, and then the sound of a chair scraping across the floor sharply, before the cafe was filled only with the usual quiet chatter once again.

No one had looked up. No one else had even flinched.

“What,” the boy asked, quiet and pressing, “you’re allowed to follow me all around Canary Wharf but I’m not allowed to Know a little more about my pursuers? That doesn’t seem terribly fair, does it?”

“I’d say it’s less fair to know someone’s secrets without their permission,” James snapped in response; and the smile he got for that lingered, small and lovely while the eyes above it brightened, before it was tucked away with the others.

“If I wanted to Know your secrets, James, I’d ask for them, and you’d give them to me. This way was kinder.”

James was caught between laughing at the idea of having his mind rooted through - as he could pretty confidently guess had just happened - being kind, and shuddering at the cold shiver that tripped down his spine at the boy knowing his name; and the Avatar of the Eye continued, quiet and conversational.

“You struck me as being unusual for the Hunt when you first walked in, and I can see why, now. It would be more accurate to say you’re in league with it; running with a true servant because your goals align. You’re not really of anything yet, are you? Not the End, despite the hooks it has in your eomeoni. Not Slaughter, though it dogs your footsteps the longer you keep fighting your war. Even that which actively covets you doesn’t have you yet.”

The boy released his wrist in favour of snatching his fingers up over James’ shoulder, quick as a snake, fingertips just brushing his jacket, before he pulled his curled fingers back toward him; and James stared as he slowly uncurled them to reveal a spider sat in his palm, long-legged and unsettlingly still.

It looked wrong; and strangely, the longer he looked at him, James thought it looked frightened.

“I hate the Web more than I’m fully capable of expressing,” the boy offered, tone still casual and conversational, before he closed both hands over the spider, cupping his palms around it, and James could have sworn that in the instant before his hands closed the irises were green again; and then he opened them, and his hands were empty, and the tattoos were back to normal.

James was coming to the conclusion that he was massively out of his depth; and he startled violently when a chair was suddenly dragged up beside him, and a stranger dropped heavily into it.

He… couldn’t tell what colour her eyes were.

“Pandora,” the boy snapped, tone hard and reprimanding; and the girl laughed, the sound both lovely and horrible at the same time, and turned her kaleidoscope eyes on him instead.

“Dorcas is thinking puppies,” she informed him, her words mystifying; but the boy scrunched his nose in distaste, and then nodded and pulled a pair of gloves from his jacket pocket. James watched him shut the book and stuff it into the satchel, watched as the girl - Pandora, he’d need to remember that - walked her fingers across the table in hypnotising little circles, all the silver rings covering them clinking together discordantly; and jumped when gloved fingers touched his chin, and the Beholding Avatar lifted his head enough that their eyes met once again.

The Spiral girl who had joined them laughed again, quiet and like nails on a chalkboard and the trill of birdsong, and James grit his teeth, and didn’t look at her.

“Take care of yourself better, James Potter. Whatever your boss’ end goal, he’s still Web; and the strings he pulls are as likely to strangle you as those you hunt with your friends.”

He held James’ eyes for a long moment, something about his expression complex and indecipherable; and James swallowed, and took a hold of his hand to pull it away from his chin, studying how the change in contact made his eyes soften at the corners.

“What’s your name?” He asked, quiet and firm; and the boy smiled at him again, fleeting and empty, and pulled his hand away.

“It’s Regulus. You won’t need to do very much research to know me, James Potter; just tell Sirius that our mother’s dead, and if he wants to talk, he knows where the house is.” Regulus dropped a handful of loose change onto the plate beneath his mug, ostensibly a tip for the waitress cleaning tables around them; and James watched him go as he turned for the door, joining Pandora in the same moment they were joined by a tall, dark skinned girl with hundreds of tiny braids twisted up into a bun on the top of her head, exposing where the symbol for The People’s Church Of The Divine Host was tattooed onto the back of her neck in gold, but had a scar slashed through the centre of it, long healed but stark on her skin.

The Eye, the Spiral, and the Dark, all exiting together, immediately falling into friendly, teasing conversation.

James scrubbed a hand across his mouth, and tried to banish the memory of Regulus’ eyes from his mind.