Work Text:
"Joseph?" Jacob asked, bracing a hand at the wooden juncture where the living room met the hallway.
The water seeped under the door. Red swirling into it. How Jacob found their mother. He never told anyone, never, she made him swear, made him promise, begged him with more emotion than he'd ever heard from her, begged the way she watched silent and blank as their father pummeled Jacob against a cracked wall, begged as his socks turned soggy with tainted well-water and her filthy blood she tried to bleed out the toxin they lived on. Blood ran down his own arms, dripped off his own fingers as she clutched him with the last of her living strength. "Don't tell them," she begged, eyes wet and wide, so clear and frightened, a ghost still living despite their long years of death. So blue, so streaked with red along the fringes, so like John. She was once like his youngest brother, Jacob tried to remind himself. The furthest he could think back on was the sting of a backhand from his father. He couldn't remember her watching, cowed and hands up to her mouth to cover the wail of despair, the opposition, even the dismissal such a sight might invoke. Still, she opened herself for Jacob to remind him of which failures he couldn't recall.
He drank well from worse waters.
He didn't want to think now remembering those who didn't cover their mouths in horror but opened their jaws wide. The dumb little tick of one note after another, a stupid trinket that kept him quiet until Joseph's sermons taught him to speak with purpose. Murmur along. Howl.
He was slow opening the door to the bathroom, until streaks of red began. Once he turned the false gold handle, they fell into one another.
Joseph rocked his forehead against Jacob's. Joseph's wet skin and Jacob's sweat mingling electric as Jacob panted, chest heaving and veins thrumming still after hunting down a reporter who would have spoken the Word of the Father with all the meaning of a dog eager to bark. Opening the door once again to soaked bloody floorboards. Jacob grabbed the back of Joseph's head and pulled it in harder, trying to cleave through his skull to reform them as twins. Dogs were to wolves.
John wandered in eventually. Faith, faltering, shortly after. They crouched around together like a family might. Faith's eyes flitting around the room like a butterfly afraid to land, trying to pollinate among polluted flowers. John tried, he did, offering "Let's clean up." Jacob pressed harder against Joseph, grabbing the back of his head as his brother tried to move away. Focus.
"The Voice, it told me..."
“No.” Jacob shook his head. Joseph tilted his. Joseph rarely shook. How many nights they both spent pretending not to feel.
Joseph then moved with a splash to hug Jacob tight to himself, a buoy amongst rapid waters. An encompassing thing. Something you cut open to find consumed alive, whole, semi-digested. Jacob cradled his brother's head to his chest so their eyes didn't have to meet. John made quick work of raiding a bathroom cabinet for thread and needle to occupy himself, any stagnation making his upper lip twitch.
"It was a warning." Joseph lifted his head from Jacob's chest to gaze up, his long hair blocking his eyesight, blending the scars across Jacob's face like the steel of a cage. Looking in, looking out at one another.
Joseph sighed and turned his head, pressing his temple against the wet shirt of Jacob's chest, heartbeat against his ear like the crashing of an ocean, the beating of a drum.
Massive loud things. 'Don't tell.'
They stayed like that a moment, Jacob's hand hovering over Joseph's naked back before threading through his scrangly hair. Greasy streaks lining his hands. Not smoothing it out or soothing him down, just reassuring that they both were there, that they were together. They felt. They bled. They shivered.
"You don't believe me," Joseph said.
Jacob scratched into his brother's scalp with the pads of his fingers, massaging at the roots, digging up soggy nailfulls of dander.
He kept weaving his fingers through strands of hair, pausing to trace along jagged striations where scars hid unaddressed for decades. Jacob pressed his fingers together. Reminded them where they were - at the Project, still alive, still here in a world not yet ended, still survivors at heart.
Nobody had to know.
The Angels tamed the fields of delusion like cultivating ghosts, acquiescing to the twitter-twatter pad of soft bare feet barely brushing burnt & golden fields. Joseph watched her. The words on his back tore open and bled.
No one had to know that they were always living it, still always there. Didn't need to know where that was. They felt each other in lieu of words. Never begging.
The Father bore his sins before an audience only in demonstration.
John's eyes would sometimes flicker with something honest and disappointed, worried and jealous. Jacob would clench his fist near the gun at his hip while Faith smiled as if wearing the muscles in her face out the way some fantasized crying so hard and so often they would no longer be capable of tears.
Joseph couldn't know the future. Jacob hugged him tighter, wrapping the hand in Joseph's hair and pressing his younger brother harder against his chest, hoping the other heard beyond the echo. Really listened, tunneled up the empty shell to its hollow point. John emphatically slammed the cabinet shut and stared hard at the hardwood. Faith resisted the urge to sing that her holy flower bestowed her, not even swinging her feet as she sat on the edge of a sink and observed through a dirty window a cougar assaulting a deer.
Joseph hunched against the far side of the bathtub as it overflowed with frigid tides. He stared at the drain, plugged with a mixture of his own clumps of hair and flaps of flesh. Exsanguinating into the running water as if to drain out with it. Jacob felt his tongue stick to the top of his mouth as he swallowed around words he couldn't say.
Jacob huffed out a breath instead. He put a firm hand on Joseph's shoulder and shook once. The Father's head bobbed with the motion but his eyes didn't so much as blink behind his glasses. Their mesmerizing mix of dried wheat and tumultuous skies washed out by the dull amber that clung to his face like rose, tinting the water flooding him more than any vein could hope to paint a clearer picture - whatever Joseph saw. Whatever poison or holy waters provoked in a person.
"It's time to get out," Jacob changed tactics, gently grasping and pulling back on Joseph's shoulder. His thumb dug into what would be a new scar - the shallow awakening in a frantic spelling that was a series of pauses and dashes, blots and staccatos of blood peeping along razor-thin edging along with bulbous, egregious fat where skin had split from the impact of those stabbing punctures - a morse code of which only Joseph knew the Rosetta Stone.
Joseph grasped Jacob on the shoulder and wandered naked from the tub. John and Faith, despite their depravities, had a sort of privilege, a sort of desperate humility to them. Jacob had nothing. Joseph... Joseph had... God, Jacob didn't know. None of them knew. They followed him, this High Water, ready for something because their lives were nothing before him. Jacob was less than. Empty. An angry thing. Pretending to not be ravenous with his maw still dripping blood.
They stumbled, shivering, into clothing then staggered into congregation.
"The Lord has blessed us!" Joseph spread his arms and called out. John's posture was casual, almost leaning against air as if shaping nature itself to accommodate him. Arms crossed, looking over at Jacob with a confident smile. Jacob resisted rolling his eyes and instead surveyed their audience. The Book clutched tight among them or fingering a page like a living bookmark. It was poorly written, outright candid. Not dissimilar from every Faith's' bliss-riddled ramblings. Joseph's strength was one-on-one - he wouldn't need a 'family' if he didn't need to compensate his own deficits. The middle Seed had never fit in well with established society, though sticking out in a crowd had turned to his advantage in an odd way.
Those incomprehensible words, those empty eyes, pleading. 'Don't tell, don't tell.' The blood in the water. The blood on Jacob's hands. Joseph's hand through his hair. Pressing them together.
The Project was not a church, it was not a cult, it was not a revolution or movement. It was a Tower. All of them speaking the same strange language as they built with pit-marked stones and ragged hands, limping up the steps ever higher until at last they reached Heaven, crying out in unison a language no-one but them understood.
Joseph Seed. Leading them towards the end of their ascent, the further they went the more his preaching became babbling. Joseph Seed. The endless ascent, and preaching along the way until the downfall of his words settled like dust to the followers desperate for the whisper-thin touch of the Father, far below.
Joseph Seed.
Seeing not only stars but constellations. Speaking only to himself at the top of a lonely peak. Pushing people off that joined him to the hungry wolves at the base for judgement.
The newest Faith refused to hold onto anything more than a hand to guide it towards the end of the world. John's brutal artwork was still art, his refuge deep and wide and too occupied, another vicious mockery of his occupation of an emptied valley. Jacob almost choked Pratt out against a wall and the acceptance instead of defiance he saw there infuriated him enough to move away, forearm falling from Staci's neck and watching dispassionately as the body fell to the ground without complaint except for coughing.
There was one point – Joseph must've looked across at the disciples he had to convert, having forgone everyone they'd rather be with, and faltered all, forgetting themselves as well. Maybe a stagger in his steps too, a gasp instead of breathing.
Rumors. 'Don't tell.' Move on like there's nothing to say.
If only we could all die alone. And being nothing, lose nothing.