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By the time Johnny trudged back from the truck, Neil had already stripped down to his underwear.
"You're too damn pale for moonlight," Johnny grumbled, mostly so he wouldn't have to think further on why Neil'd stripped down at all. He handed over Neil's garment bag. It was one of those fancy nylon numbers Miles used to store his suits, except Johnny was pretty sure Neil had never owned a suit ever in his life unless one came through the pawn shop, and Neil didn't exactly live in that sort of neighborhood.
Neil accepted the bag without really looking at him. "I have to be out under the stars for this to work, or... Oh, that was a joke." He laughed weakly. "I'm not used to... It's usually just me."
"You shouldn't be out here on your own, Neil, the roads are fuckin— This is lupine territory. I killed one of their kids. Don't come out here alone. We shouldn't be out here together. We shouldn't be out here at all."
Neil's weak laughter morphed into an even weaker smile. "Just me on my roof. Unless you count my telescope? No one around to," he gestured down at himself, "to see." He smiled unhappily, then unzipped his garment bag.
Well, it wasn't a suit.
Neil shook out the robe and smoothed his hand down the length of it, though there weren't any wrinkles as far as Johnny could see. It wasn't the kind of fabric that wrinkled easily. He wasn't exactly sure what he'd expected. Definitely not a pointy wizard hat. An off the rack Halloween costume hadn't been entirely out of the question, considering the sort of junk Neil liked to collect, but the robe was sewn from thick, sturdy fabric, soft with age the way a well-maintained leather jacket only grew more supple over time.
Neil pulled it on. Draped in cloth, he looked less like a gangly adolescent and more like, well, Neil would never look comfortable, but he looked alright. He looked good, maybe even confident. The robe suited him. Most of Neil's clothes had a tendency to hang off of him, back bent like a beanpole bowed beneath its own growth. But the robe did not hang. It draped over his frame like it was tailored to do exactly that. Hell, maybe it was.
It struck Johnny then that Neil had been at this Dur-An-Ki bullshit for long before they’d ever met. He'd been studying it since Johnny had still been human. Maybe even since Johnny had been a child. And he knew, logically, that Neil was the oldest of their coterie, but Johnny never once felt the difference of decades between them. Neil was like Britta, who was like Jessica: He was a small, kind, innocent thing that belonged beneath Johnny's protection. Neil could not be a blood sorcerer. He was not Johnny's elder. He was— He was not a child. But he was Johnny's responsibility, his coteriemate, his friend, and he was never meant to suffer harm by Johnny's hand, not even if Neil was the one who asked.
For a moment, Neil looked as if he wanted to say something, but changed course. He bent to fish through his discarded jeans. A scrawny thigh poked from within his robe, pale skin turned ghostly by the moonlight. He should have looked ridiculous. It did look ridiculous. Neil was a pale little nerd in the middle of a field, wearing briefs and a robe and nothing else, playing wizard beneath the stars. Johnny sure as hell felt ridiculous, and maybe a few other things not worth naming. It was ridiculous. Absurd. There was no way this was the Neil Foster he knew.
And yet Neil moved with confidence. Johnny might even call it grace. Neil, who never quite seemed to know how to hold his body or exist in a space, for once stood with his back held straight. He flattened the Abbot's portrait out on his knee, and the moonlight lit her up, too. That was the point of this all, wasn't it? To ask the moon? Neil would do — something, and then the moon, the stars, the heavens would answer. The night sky itself would guide them to the Abbot, and help them defend their city. It was a nice thought, he supposed. Johnny never could wrap his head around a thing like God's guiding love, though his in-laws sure tried, and anyway, even if he had, a thing like that wasn't meant for Kindred.
But a friend agreeing to lend a hand, because you took the time to ask? Well, Johnny was here, wasn't he? Because Neil had asked. So maybe the heavens would come too.
Without a word, Neil turned back to his altar. Johnny didn't want to think of it as an altar, for obvious reasons, and it would have made a damn stupid altar anyway. It was just one of those folding tables you set up in the yard to hold your hot dogs and beer and lukewarm egg salad. This table held a bowl, and a knife, and a small stack of coins which glinted a ruddy shade of gold. So. So, yeah, it made a damn stupid altar, and he didn't like to think of something so common as something so fucked. But it was an altar.
Neil stood before it, and cut his left hand open. He made a fist over the bowl, forcing himself to bleed over the portrait until its features all but disappeared. He held the knife out for Johnny to take, its cutting edge still wet with vitae. Johnny took it. What else was he supposed to do? He fought the urge to wipe the blade on his jeans. It was a beautiful piece, not showy or decorative, but beautiful in the way all well-made weapons were beautiful, well-weighted for such a small thing, its edge honed so finely that Neil might not even feel the cut when Johnny—
He flinched from the thought.
Neil mashed the saturated portrait into a bloody ball, brought the mess to his mouth, and swallowed her whole. He turned his head to the sky, mouth parted. His lips moved soundlessly.
Then nothing.
Johnny waited. Neil had told him it would take time. He waited, and he waited. Minutes passed, time marked only by cigarettes burning to their filters and the moon crawling across the sky. Johnny did his best not to think of his own role in Neil's ritual, or what it would require of him. He tried not to watch Neil work. But what else was there out here to see? Johnny circled Neil instead, eyes on the tree line, the road, the sky. This was lupine country, and the Sabbat were in New Haven, and they were stupid to even be out here.
Neil, too, watched the sky. His eyes shone with starlight. The moon did awful things to Neil’s complexion. It washed him out. His hollow cheeks sank deeper; his sunken eyes bled into deeper shades of bruise. And yet with his head tilted to the sky, utterly focused on the task, Neil was…
Had Johnny ever seen Neil at peace, before?
Is this what that looked like?
He was trying not to watch. Johnny began his rounds again. He smoked, and he paced, and the time dragged by.
Neil sucked in a huge, stuttering gasp that stopped Johnny in his tracks.
"Now," he said to Johnny urgently. "The auspicious moment is now. Finish the ritual."
Neil turned his head from the sky to find him, but the moon still hollowed out his features, and, god, his pupils were the size of blackened dinner plates. Starlight still lurked somewhere within — a piece of the heavens brought down to them.
Johnny pressed Neil's shoulder as if to guide him— where? The table? The truck? They should have brought a blanket. Somewhere they could... Neil deserved better than to lie in the dirt while Johnny cut him open. He deserved so much more than Rowlands' madness and his fucking Ordeal, or Reiss's suspicion, or New Haven's ire. If only they knew what Neil was willing to endure for them. He'd already tried to die for New Haven once, in Elsa Linden's place.
And now this.
Johnny helped the robe from Neil's shoulders so he could spread that out over the grass, then guided Neil to the ground. There really was no other word for the way Neil moved wherever Johnny put him, and it made him feel like just the worst sort of monster. He could guide Neil anywhere. He could ask Neil anything, and Neil would comply. Johnny did his best to make Neil comfortable, and knelt beside him — blade in one hand, Neil's shoulder in the other. He let that hand slide to Neil's belly. This, too, was a pale, hollow thing. With Neil stretched on the ground, the moonlight cast sharp shadows from each and every rib. 'You should eat more,' said a part of him, long dead. 'Come over for dinner. We'd be happy to have you.’
Johnny pressed the knife into Neil's belly. He held himself steady as he pulled it across. He did not let himself pause, not for a moment, not even while Neil whimpered and twitched and began to cry. He held surprisingly still for a man being gutted on the ground. At least the moon was bright enough to see by. That damn, damned moon.
Only with the first incision over did Johnny let himself take his bearings in again. Neil made a noise. It sounded like a question — hopeful, desperate — and Johnny was forced to shake his head. "That was just the skin. The fat. I still have to find your stomach. I— Shit, Neil, I'm—"
"It's okay," Neil said quickly, in a whisper of a voice that was anything but okay. "It's the ritual, and you have to. Don't, please. Don't apologize."
Johnny couldn't bring himself to answer. He had to push forward. He set the knife aside. He pushed his hands into Neil's belly. They were beyond pained whimpering now. Johnny could not blame him, and yet— Yet, he hated the sound, and he could not help but to think, well, if it were Miles, he would have grit his teeth and silently endured. If it was Wynn she'd have cursed him out the whole time through, and that would have been its own sort of comfort. He would never agree to do a thing like this to Britta, not for any advantage in the world, and he should not have agreed to do it to Neil.
Inside of Neil, cold and dead and wet, Johnny's hands found something warm. It tingled up his fingertips like, like the air before a storm? Like a live wire. His hair stood up on the back of his neck. It was warm.
"I found it," he breathed. He hadn't expected warmth. Not— like this. He reached for the knife again. Neil had stopped crying. He couldn't exactly say when that happened. The silence was almost worse. But Neil nodded like he heard, his eyes still open and unseeing, and still full of stars. Maybe he needed to keep them that way. Maybe for this to work he had to see the sky. Johnny hated the moon just then. He really did.
Johnny cut the portrait free.
The stars blinked out from Neil's eyes.
"It's over," one of them said. Johnny wasn't sure which. For a moment, the barriers sort of... He didn't know. He wondered if Neil always felt like this, so sick with power. He wondered if this was what it meant to be Malkavian. He clung to Neil. Or Neil clung to him. They were both bloody. The boundaries didn't seem to matter. They moved together.
"Thank you." That was Neil, Johnny felt sure, and as the thought passed through him he became aware of Neil in his arms. He'd sat up at some point, and now pressed his head against Johnny's chest. Bloody tears smeared against his leather jacket. God, he was so glad to have Neil against him, to feel him move, to know he did not hate him for wielding the knife, even if it was at Neil's own request. Johnny opened his fist, and the feeling of connection faded. He was himself again, and Neil was only Neil, and he knew which of them moved when.
"I... Yeah. Okay," Johnny began. "Fine. You're welcome." He moved to stroke Neil's back. It was the least he could do to comfort him, bring him back down from whatever place in the sky he'd gone, but. But Johnny's hands were still black with gore. He still clutched the bloodied, crumpled portrait Neil had bled for.
Johnny disentangled them from each other to flatten the paper out on the ground between them.
"Thank you," Neil said again, more firmly this time. "We did it. This should, I mean, it'll help."
"Don't—" But Johnny shook his head. He thought of Neil, whimpering. He thought of Neil's eyes, wide and blind with starlight. That'd been the worst part. "Never mind. Just don't ask me to do this for you again."