It had nearly ruined his reputation, to end it without any explanation. Cordelia knew, though, in the way he had looked at Artemy as if he were the only thing in the universe. Twenty years ago, they had been forced to pay her monthly for her silence, for Cordelia Blackwell did not forgive easily - especially regarding the fact that she lost her beloved fiancé to a peasant boy hardly worth anything.

And now, she was in his house for the first time, and she recognized him still.

She had hardly changed, though grey peppered her chestnut hair, making her updo look almost regal in appearance. She wore black - as all the mourners did - though Artemy knew that she did not mourn anything besides a lost paycheck. She had never married, for Cassius had ensured that she was well taken care of.

She was a damned leech to Artemy, and he felt a hot rush of anger at the sight of her. He would be damned if she continued to blackmail him, though he had little time to form words before she was turning her back to him.

“Continue,” she said to the priest, strutting back to her chair at the very front of the room as if they had actually been married.

Artemy could almost feel the eyes on him as he stood in the aisle, unaware that the funeral had been so masterfully arranged without his knowing. It felt like an injustice that he had not been allowed any say in his own husband’s burial. The priest shuffled over to the coffin, raising his arms as a hush fell over the room. It was time to pray, the priest commanded.

He closed his eyes but the words would not come, for he was not sorry for hs sins. He was not sorry that he loved Cassius even if he spent his eternity in hell. How could anything compare to the heaven he felt in life - with him? The prayer was wasted and he nearly forgot about the doom he felt.

Until he opened his eyes.

Someone had opened the coffin lid at some point between the prayer and the sermon, but Artemy was first focused on where the priest had been standing. Christ Himself stood before the coffin, his arms raised, his palms still bloody from the crucifixion. He gasped and nearly fell back, only for Christ to look at him in concern - Cordelia turning in disgust.

“Forgive me,” he whimpered to the face of the prophet, only for someone to mutter that grief was forgivable - that he was shocked. He was being led to a chair to rest, and someone mentioned being overly excited about the murder.

The murder. It was hell to think about, it was hell to remember. Artemy’s eyes widened as panic settled in, as the unreality of his new life surrounded him, and he looked at the body of Cassius to find that his blonde hair was artificially yellow in the light, shining like the sun and shining like fire.

Hellfire surrounded the room and covered them all and he was falling into oblivion to be tortured, and he was terrified, screaming for mercy, for help, for Cassius. He saw a demon rising from the coffin where Cassius had been, a beast of a man. His only thought was that Cassius had tried to be the angel for so long, only to become the beast.

He fell out of his chair into the fire and ran for the coffin, sobbing and shrieking in the room of strangers. The fire was gone and the priest was trying to calm him, only to be shoved roughly by Artemy. He was babbling now, speaking utter nonsense that even his brain did not comprehend for a few moments.

“He can’t go - he can’t! I won’t let him!” The mirrors hanging on the walls of the dark room were covered with black cloths - an attempt to keep Cassius’s spirit from lingering.

Artemy tore them all down, one by one. The mourners were all too shocked to stop him and he was sobbing all the while, gripping the fabric as he grasped the final mirror. His eyes were squeezed shut for a moment as he shuddered, imagining Cassius’s spirit moving through him and entering the glass, trapped perhaps for forever.

“Was it ennui that killed you?” Artemy asked nothing at all. “Were you so tired of me, a living man, that you preferred the company of soon to be corpses?”

He opened his eyes and somehow did not scream, the color draining from his skin as he looked at a monster in his skin, with devilish eyes and a bloodied faced, the features distorted beyond belief. There was a catastrophe blossoming beneath his skin. He was in hell again, except there were no demons to torture him - save for one. Cassius stood behind him, translucent in the light, the bloodied wound in his back bleeding forever. It would fill the room. It would drown them all.

“You’re making a fool of yourself!” A woman scolded, gripping his arms and forcing him around, her long nails digging into his flesh. He looked at the unnerved face of Cordelia, whom had never touched him before. “Stop this at once!”

“I’ll kill you if you touch me once more,” he said, his voice shaking. He could not imagine ever making such a threat, and yet it came out with ease. Cordelia released him, her thin brows furrowed.

“You’re mad,” she said. “You’ve always been mad. To take Cassius away and convince him to-“

He lunged for her in an animalistic desire to preserve the one secret Cassius had, even if it meant their being buried separate, being written down in history as mere friends. Several strong arms held him back - men from Cassius’s boyhood and family. They all shared the same look of grim understanding, and one spoke of a doctor. Someone else mentioned a madhouse.

One man broke away to shake the priest’s hand and apologize, and when they were distracted, Artemy ran. He would not be drug to his death, to the gallows, to the street where Cassius had died. Cassius died holding the hands of men that no one would touch, and Artemy wanted nothing more than to hold Cassius’s hand again. To love the unlovable - it was godly.

The letters. He remembered them so suddenly that he changed his direction from the coffin to the front door, exploding from them in a mad dash for the graveyard. The letters had been discovered because the earth had been dug up again, uncovering an old corpse to make room for another.

The streetlamp were not yet lit when he crawled up the hill, clenching the dry grass that shown a pale green in the moonlight. He would find them. He would.

A rock protruding from the earth caught his foot and he fell for far too long, shrieking as he hit the ground with a sickening thud, his shoulder popping from the weight of the fall. It took him a moment to come back to reality, and he opening his eyes to find that he only saw brown, fresh earth.

He turned onto his other side and found more earth, more dirt with worms and plant roots.

The clock of Big Ben ticked, but it couldn’t have from so far away. Artemy rolled onto his back, only to look up at a rainy sky, the droplets finally falling onto his face. He almost felt at peace, and to him, the moon looked much like an old lover coming down into the grave to greet him again.