Luke settled to translating and Alex watched him for a while. He knew he should be picking up the paperwork and seeing what he could find but there was something stopping him. He was the first to admit that he had never really come to terms with what had happened to him in Greece. To have someone inside him and guiding him through his life was a thought not easily digested. Then when his other-self had left, when the Greek child was taken from him along with the visible scars, Alex had lost his connection to people's thoughts and emotions. At first it had been like losing a limb, a sense cut cruelly from him and lost forever. Then as his life settled he began to feel normal. The kind of normal a man like Luke would want to be with for the rest of his life.
When the power inside him began to visit him in his dreams and the spark became visible, Alex had alternated between horror and relief. He had kept it a secret from Luke for so long just so he could enjoy being part of a normal committed couple. Luke was the other half of him and he wouldn't do a single thing to hurt the man. Fondly he glanced over at his lover. Luke, predictably, was concentrating hard on the papers, with his glasses on his nose and a pen between his teeth. Every so often he scribbled details on a piece of paper next to him.
"I love you, Luke MacKinnon," Alex whispered.
Luke didn't hear. Luke wouldn't hear thunder next to his ear if he was in translating mode. Alex was safe to say what he wanted.
He couldn't put it off any longer and carefully he picked up the sheaf of papers Luke had already translated. They sat in his grip innocuously enough, just slips of paper with Luke's bold letters on each. The original Voynich code on the top half and the translation with Luke's notes on the bottom. Alex examined each sheet, of which there were seventy-two so far. Every page had a small code in the top right-hand corner, which Alex assumed was some kind of reference to the original. There was nothing else on the paper, which were cheap, store-bought plain sheets. No watermark to confuse matters, or shapes out of place that he could see.
Settling himself, he pulled over a plain sheet and a pencil of his own, and concentrating hard, he rifled the papers as he would a notebook and watched carefully. Nothing. No theta as a symbol of death, or indeed symbol for anything. He tried a few more times, working from front to back and in reverse. Nothing.
There was nothing else he could do except let a little of the blue inside him to his fingertips and cautiously cast a hue of blue over the papers. Still nothing. Defeated he let irritation spark inside him and, still connected to the power inside him, the blue spat from his fingers and shot over the sheets. Suddenly it was there. The symbol. Theta. Then another, and another.
Quickly he scribbled them on a sheet, and the symbols danced in the air in front of him even as he pushed the papers to the table.
"Luke! Are you seeing this?" Alex couldn't take his eyes off of the movement but Luke wasn't answering. Furiously Alex attempted to get what he could see in front of him onto paper and his hand hurt with the ferocity of what he was trying to do. The symbols moved closer around him and he jumped back in his chair as they became solid and threatening. Their color, a burnt rust, was changing. Turning from brown to dark to red to blood as he watched. He didn't know what was happening. The blue inside him that sparked and fizzed was dancing with the red and Alex felt fear build inside him.
"Luke!" he shouted. "Luke!" Nothing. No response then suddenly Luke was there, his cool hands on Alex centering him.
"Alex! Alex! Fuck. Alex?"
Alex could hear Luke but suddenly every ounce of energy fled from him and his vision went black. Luke's hands were pulling him back and away from the table and he could feel his vulnerable body curling in on itself.
"It's okay, Alex, just breathe, come on, breathe."
Alex grabbed the hand that touched him and felt the snap of electricity as it dissipated into Luke.
Luke gasped, Alex could hear that, and he tried to say sorry. He needed Luke to ground him, and gripping his hand hard, Alex slowed his rapid breathing and concentrated on the real world. Minutes? Hours? He didn't know. He only knew that the floor of the vault was metal and cold and hard and that Luke wasn't leaving his side. He heard other voices. Chris. Griff.
"What he drew," Griff said. "Did he know what you were writing?"
"What happened?" Chris asked. "Was it him or something else?"
"I don't know." Luke's voice was troubled. "I was in my zone and then I just got hit with this field of blue and when I picked myself up off the floor Alex was shouting my name and convulsing in the chair."
"What did he write? What is it?" Chris said.
"Pass it to me," Luke replied. He released one of Alex's hands. Alex felt immediately bereft and told himself he needed to move to get closer to Luke.
He groaned and rolled onto his back, cracking his eyes open to see Luke scanning whatever shit he had managed to slice into the paper. Thick black shapes still danced on his retinas but at least the blood had stopped dripping from them. His head hurt, it pounded and pressed, and pain carved into his skull.
"What the hell?" Luke said. His mouth moved as he traced the shapes. Then Alex sensed the horror building inside of Luke and he pushed himself to sit up against a bookcase so he could help.
"What?" he croaked out with some effort. His throat hurt, and he couldn't think why until he remembered he had been screaming something at Luke.
"My name," Luke said softly. He shuffled closer to Alex, pressing into him and passing Alex some of his calm, settling thoughts. "Just like on your thigh. My name."
Okay. That wasn't something too far out of the realms of possibility. Alex could see the symbols still on his inner thigh, he would remember those. Alex traced the symbols again.
"The theta is there again," Luke observed.
"I know. The symbol of death." Alex coughed and someone, Griff he thought, passed him a bottle of water that he drank from gratefully. The soft coolness went some way to soothing his burning throat.
"Well, tau is here, and in ancient times, tau was used as a symbol for life, or sometimes resurrection. So we have life and death in juxtaposition, one at the beginning and one at the end. It's the rest of this that I don't understand. There's a whole paragraph on rebirth, on Apollo."
"Apollo? Him again? From Delphi?" Chris said. "Why is a fourteenth century manuscript talking about Apollo and can someone please explain to me what the hell is going on?"
"Hell," Luke said tiredly. "It talks about a painted man."
Chris looked at Alex and Alex couldn't meet his gaze. He suddenly felt dirty and wrong, like his whole body had been taken over by the gods again. Chris had never understood the first time, he was unlikely to understand now.
"Alex is the painted man." Chris was still staring at Alex as he spoke. "I remember that from Greece, when the ancient script said a painted man held the secrets to the Oracle."
"It says the painted man can read this. The symbols talk of resurrection and rebirth, of life and death, and secrets only the painted man will know."
"Me?" Alex coughed. "I don't know any fucking secrets."
"Not you, but maybe this freaky sixth-sense blue shit of yours," Chris observed. "Maybe that can see the secrets. Hence the collapsing on the floor like a girl."
Alex glared at his friend. Chris may well be joking to lighten the atmosphere but Alex felt stretched to the limit and didn't appreciate the humor.
"Okay. We need to get you off the floor and out of here," Luke said.
Griff and Luke helped Alex to stand, Chris took the water, and as a small group they shuffled him out of the vault and to the main sitting room with plush sofas. Alex slumped gratefully in the closest one, a single-seater, and rested his head on the back. The pain hadn't receded and he was grateful when Griff passed him some form of meds and Chris gave him the remains of the bottle of water.
Luke paced in front of him clutching the paper to his chest and with a frown on his face. He was in thinking mode and as much as Alex wanted to ask what the hell was going on he recognized that Luke needed to concentrate. Sitting like this he at least felt like his head wasn't going to split open. Luke finally stopped pacing and sat on the opposite chair. With Griff to one side and Dragan and Sofija on the main sofa it was up to Chris to take over the pacing.
"Okay," Luke began carefully. Then he ceased talking and peered down at the paper again.
"Okay what?" Alex prompted. His throat felt better but the spoken words hurt his head.
"The symbols, life and death, or rather death and resurrection, are both in there. Then there is my name, but that could just be Alex looking to what he remembered from his thigh and could have been a cry for help or something when he was mid-meltdown." Luke leaned forward in his chair then dipped his head in embarrassment.
"I wanted you to make it stop," Alex said. "So maybe I was channeling your name. I don't remember writing the words though, not just 'Luke McKinnon', but everything."
Luke smiled, and for a second Alex lost himself in Luke's soft brown eyes. He wished he could go sit with his boyfriend, but it wasn't fair to dump everything that was swimming in his head on Luke when he was attempting to unravel just what the fuck had happened to Alex.
"So leaving that out, this is just a standard story, a tale of a death and then the love of the gods giving one chance for resurrection. I can see where the idea of immortality may come from. If DaVinci was coding the idea of resurrection then he may have passed on that knowledge and far from being resurrection it was now eternal life. There's magic in the words." Luke shook his head. "Hell, I may well have been at Delphi, but magic?"
Luke continued. "It talks about payment in blood—"
"I saw blood. On the paper," Alex interrupted, "on the words in the air." He waved a hand in front of him, indicating where he had seen the markings.
Chris huffed, Griff nodded, and Luke simply stared. As for Dragan, he looked scared, hopeful, and a million other things Alex couldn't read.
"So, blood and uhmm… there was a connection through the sacrifice of blood of a mother or father and their dying daughter, and to a third person, the painted man, and then there's my name. The sacrifice of the blood was enough. Then it ends."
Silence. Absolute quiet and Alex closed his mind to everyone else's questions. He had seen the letters, watched the blood, then written the whole thing as some kind of instruction manual.
"Could this work for us?" Dragan asked finally. Alex knew without reading his friends that this was what every single one of them had thought. That maybe through Alex, Dragan could, what, give blood? Sacrifice himself? So that his daughter could be somehow cleaned of illness?
"It's a story," Alex said. He didn't want to be the one to break the sudden fervor in Dragan's eyes but that was all this was. Just a story. Luke would back him up. "Luke. Tell him."
Luke shook his head and briefly closed his eyes. When he opened them they held sorrow and resignation.
"As much of a story as the Oracle," Luke said. His simple words hung in the air between them all.
"Alex. You make sure Sofija is safe," Dragan said. "When I'm gone you take her somewhere she can have a family." Dragan's voice sounded soft and determined.
Alex sat up.
"What do you mean?" Alex asked immediately. Then his brain caught up with what he was saying and he knew in an instant what Dragan was going to do. In his mind's eye he could see the knife slice through the artery in Dragan's wrist, from elbow to hand the blade sliced skin, and the blood left Dragan in an instant.
If Alex had been more alert, if he had realized what belief Dragan had in whatever lived inside Alex, then maybe he could have been quicker. Dragan didn't slump to the floor, he simply lay back in the chair and positioned his hand across his thigh.
"Make it right for my baby," he said. Then he closed his eyes.
Alex stumbled to stand and Luke made it to Dragan's side in an instant. They were covered in his blood in seconds and Alex could feel Dragan's heart pumping furiously as the tear in the artery flooded the room with fresh scarlet.
"Should I call 999?" Griff shouted over the chaos.
"Take Sofija," Alex replied just as quickly.
Dragan was going. He was already unconscious and as the seconds ticked on and he heard Sofija screaming in Griff's arms at the door, all Alex could do was watch Dragan die. He searched inside, tried everything to call the blue from him, but all he had was silence. Griff held a crying Sofija, Chris was at the door trying to hustle them away when suddenly she tore free and screamed for her father. Somehow she must have felt the terror in the room and she crawled to him, grabbing his pants and climbing him. He was gone. There was nothing Alex could read. Dragan was dead, had bled out in mere minutes and left this place. Alex tried to grab at Sofija to stop her from getting to her dad. Luke helped, but the blood was so slippery and they couldn't grip hard enough. She clambered onto his lifeless body and keened. Pain so intense it sent Alex to his knees knifed through him and Luke reached out to hold him up. The moment Luke touched him it was as if he was grounded. The cerulean-silver light curled inside him, and then in a burst of violent energy, it sped through his body and sparked and hissed under his skin. The energy was white fire and it hurt.
The blue lit the entire room and only Luke's grip on him, unwavering and steady, was enough for him to know he was still in the room itself. The blue crawled from him, fingers creeping toward where Sofija and her father were, and suddenly the crying stopped. The thrust of power was enough to make Alex shut his eyes and he simply held on to Luke as if he was being taken away. Then with finality, a curtain of black descended over his eyes, and he collapsed, exhausted, on the floor.